The Hollywoodbets Sharks got some much needed wriggle room as they moved away from the bottom of the log while the DHL Stormers continue to soar at the top, but the star billing for South African rugby in round 7 of the Vodacom URC was provided by someone who didn’t even play.
When Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu appeared on the DHL Stadium field at halftime of the Stormers’ tight game against the Lions to be confirmed as a home-based player until at least the 2029 season, it wasn’t just good news for the Cape franchise and the team’s fans.
The Stormers and Springbok flyhalf is already a global star but who knows how much his standing may have grown by the time we get to the next World Cup and beyond that. After all, he only first started playing for the Boks last year, and had played only a few games, mostly at centre, for the Stormers before making his international debut.
He’s already reached the point where his name is mentioned in media stories that aren’t even related to South African rugby. For instance, in a feature in the UK version of The Sunday Times on the former British and Irish Lions and England centre Jerry Guscott, the subject starts off by talking about Feinberg-Mngomezulu’s wondrous talent.
“He is super-special. He is fast, he has physical presence, he is incredibly fit,” said Guscott of the Springbok flyhalf who is still only 23.
“He has the pace of a winger and he has presence. He can command a game with his boots. He scored a try in the Rugby Championship recently where he kicked the ball from his own half, sprinted and reached it first. Antoine Dupont is back playing again after injury, but this guy is going to take over from Dupont as the world’s best player. He is phenomenal.”
Take over from Dupont? A few months ago it was hard to imagine anyone suggesting the French scrumhalf could be anything less than the best in the world, and yet Guscott probably isn’t alone in thinking that. The overseas clubs would have been thinking that too and the Bishops old boy and product of the Western Province system value would have gone through the roof.
BEAT OFF OVERSEAS INTEREST
It felt almost certain that there’d be a big money offer from overseas to lure him away, which was confirmed in the announcement, and it was known that one of the Stormers’ rivals inside the country were also preparing a mega-offer. So it is a major coup for the Stormers that he will be theirs for at least another four years, and for SA rugby at franchise level that the most talked about rugby player in the world will be playing his rugby here.
Feinberg-Mngomezulu wasn’t playing for the Stormers at the weekend because of injury and they won without him, with Jurie Matthee in unerring form with his goalkicking boot and also pretty decent with his allround game, which was a reminder that there is depth in the Cape just as there is depth in the country. But it is the best, the real mega-stars, that put bums on seats and that’s what Feinberg-Mngomezulu will do going forward.
There were almost 30 000 at the game which isn’t bad when you consider that the Lions don’t rank with the Sharks or Vodacom Bulls when it comes to drawing interest as opponents, and also that everyone who came to the DHL Stadium would only have come to watch rugby.
There was no additional draw of a concert or festival such as the SharksFest that was so well marketed by the Durban franchise that it filled out Hollywoodbets Kings Park like it hasn’t been filled for a domestic game since the 2012 Currie Cup final.
Some who were there say there were lots of empty seats despite the sell out, which may mean there were many who just purchased tickets so they could be at the festival, but by all accounts the deep, throaty roar of Kings Park was back. It has been absent for many a year, at least when the Boks are not playing there, and that has to be a good thing.
STORMERS PROVIDING EXAMPLE OF HOW TO BUILD PLATFORM
It was a good thing too that the Sharks won, for if interest is to be sustained winning does have to be the draw. The Sharks can’t afford to stage a SharksFest every week and, as Bok coach Rassie Erasmus would say, let the main thing, being rugby, be the main thing.
Sometimes the Sharks bosses give the impression they forget that, and perhaps some lessons can be learned from the way their coastal rivals have gone about putting in the building blocks for success.
The Stormers haven’t gone on a spending spree to bring players in from outside the region, and have relied on developing what they have. Let’s not just focus on Sacha, there’s another monstrous talent on their books who could go on to become a global star in the form of Paul de Villiers.
A year ago he was a promising youngster, now it feels like he's already arrived and he's still just 22. Okay, so openside flank isn’t as fashionable as flyhalf, so he won’t be a Sacha, but De Villiers won his third consecutive man-of-the-match award and is starting to remind me of Wahl Bartmann, a legendary Natal and Bok flanker of yesteryear, now that his starting to show up almost as much as a carrier as he does with his ball scavenging.
The Stormers got home with five log points from what was easily their worst performance of the season so far but it was enough to see them go into the Christmas break (well it’s a break for SA teams) with a comfortable lead on the top of the URC log. They have seven wins in seven starts in the URC, and if you add their two in the Champions Cup, that’s nine in nine.
Five of those wins were overseas and there were times on Saturday it looked like now that they have learned to win away they have forgotten how to do it at home. For their game management was decidedly poor, and yet it was the standout feature of their play in the big overseas games they won at Munster and Bayonne.
SHARKS’ GAME MANAGEMENT STARTING SOME MOMENTUM
The Sharks for once got their game management right, and seeing it was the second game in a row and in both they got home against rated teams, that is a huge positive for the Durban side. Their win didn’t do much for the SA challenge in the sense that it prevented the Bulls from lifting themselves to a position where they can challenge for a top four place.
The Lions’ defeat in Cape Town leaves them seventh, eight points behind fourth placed Glasgow Warriors, who scored a good win in a competitive 1872 derby at Hampden Park, and two ahead of the now eighth placed Bulls. The Sharks’ win lifted them from 14th to 12th and right now their immediate objective needs to be to get themselves into the top eight rather than look at the top four finish of last year.
The next time SA teams will play in the competition will be 3 January, when the Sharks host the Lions in Durban and the Stormers host what should be a seismic north/south derby, with an element of desperation now injected into their arch-rivals from Pretoria following five successive defeats across the two major competitions.
It was a weekend of surprises elsewhere, something that often happens in derby rounds, with Cardiff losing their second position on the log due to a home defeat to Scarlets, Leinster had to dig deep and come from behind to beat Ulster, while few would have seen the Dragons’ big win over Connacht coming.
Seventh round Vodacom URC results
Cardiff Rugby 17 Scarlets 21
Leinster 24 Ulster 20
DHL Stormers 34 Lions 27
Benetton 21 Zebre 15
Glasgow Warriors 24 Edinburgh 12
Hollywoodbets Sharks 21 Vodacom Bulls 12
Ospreys 10 Munster 26
Dragons 48 Connacht 28