Ken Borland

Joey Mongalo, the man behind the Bulls’ defensive steel in recent years, will take over as the Sharks’ Currie Cup head coach next season, the union confirmed on Monday.

Sean Everitt will continue to be the senior coach steering the Sharks’ United Rugby Championship campaign, while Springbok Sevens coach Neil Powell will oversee all the coaches in his position of Director of Rugby, and will arrive at Kings Park in time for the start of the new European campaign in September.

Mongalo, a University of Pretoria Masters graduate, will get the chance to be a head coach again having won the U19 Currie Cup with the Lions in 2016 and 2017. His work as the Bulls defence coach from June 2020 was highly rated, with the franchise dominating local rugby with back-to-back Currie Cup titles as well as making the final of this year’s URC.

Etienne Fynn, who oversaw a disappointing Sharks Currie Cup campaign this year, will work under Mongalo as a scrum/forwards coach. Former Springbok wings JP Pietersen and Lwazi Mvovo, along with former Sharks U20 head coach Mike Vowles and former utility forward Luvuyiso Lusaseni, will make up the rest of Mongalo’s coaching staff.

The URC team has been boosted by the signing of former French international and Bayonne head coach Yannick Bru, who will fulfil the role of breakdown coach. Bru won the Champions Cup twice as a player with Toulouse, whom he also served as an assistant coach for five years, before becoming the French national team’s forwards coach.

Bru’s extensive knowledge of European rugby will obviously be of great value for the Sharks as they negotiate the challenges of taking on English and French clubs for the first time next season. He will be joined by Warren Whiteley, Phiwe Nomlomo, Noel McNamara and Aksventi Giorgadze as the URC assistant coaches.

Powell’s arrival after the Sevens World Cup in September will complete the new dawn of coaching at Kings Park.

“Neil will be at the helm, to develop and oversee all rugby structures within the Sharks and to ensure that our teams are aligned in terms of the identified coaching DNA,” Sharks CEO Eduard Coetzee said.

“He will implement and manage an effective plan to achieve the franchise’s objectives, which is ultimately to win trophies. He will oversee the United Rugby Championship, as well as our first foray in the Champions Cup.

“As a globally respected and admired coach, we are confident that he will get the best out of the players and bring a winning mindset to The Sharks. We look forward to him joining us before the start of the URC season in September.
“Although we made the playoffs of the URC and qualified for the Champions Cup, we want to be even more competitive. A strong foundation has been laid, and the time has come for us to build from this,” Coetzee said.

Six IPL teams are in the shake-up for ownership of the six franchises that will play in Cricket South Africa’s new T20 tournament early next year, CSA chief executive Pholetsi Moseki has confirmed.

The proposed tournament, which is co-owned by CSA, SuperSport and former IPL chief operating officer Sundar Raman, is eager to target the lucrative Indian market.

“There are big things planned for our T20 league and six IPL teams have submitted bids to invest in a franchise, as well as other Indian investors and teams from the Pakistan Super League,” Moseki told Saturday Citizen.

“The global interest has exploded and we’ve had almost 30 Expressions of Interest received. An independent service provider, which is one of the big four global audit firms, will do an evaluation of all the bids.

“This T20 league is quite key to our sustainability going forward and we have a long-term plan along with our partner SuperSport,” Moseki said.

While the unveiling of who the successful bidders are could still take a little while, CSA are expected to announce the appointments of new executive staff like the director of cricket, chief financial officer and chief commercial officer, in the next week or so.

The new T20 competition is scheduled to start on January 12, and CSA are so determined to ensure their Proteas stars are there from the start that they have requested the postponement of the ODI leg of their tour to Australia.

“In terms of the FTP and big tours involving Australia and England, we’ve had to manage some challenges,” Moseki said. “But we’ve cleared our January schedule from 2024 on and want to make the best we can of this tournament.

“When we started our planning in November last year, most of our first meeting was about the scheduling. We considered November and December, and February as well, but January is best.

“There are exams in November and it can’t be December because that would be terrible for our international commitments. It is just the nature of the calendar that you are always competing against someone. Just not the IPL because no-one can compete against them.

“We knew there was talk about the Emirates T20 targeting that January window as well, but we back ourselves. In January, South Africans are still in holiday mode, the varsities haven’t opened yet,” Moseki pointed out.

WorldRugby this week confirmed the hosts of their World Cup tournaments for men and women through to 2033 and proved again that, as the governing body for the sport, they are mainly concerned with making as much money as possible and not necessarily the good of the game or sporting principles like fairness and equity.

Of the nine men’s World Cup tournaments held, six have been won by New Zealand and South Africa, and yet they are the countries most unlikely to ever host rugby’s showpiece tournament again, purely for economic reasons.

New Zealand’s small population and time zone issues mean the 2011 tournament they won is likely to be the last one they ever host, while South Africa are mainly prejudiced by their weak economy. Although the exchange rate does make hosting the tournament cheaper, WorldRugby still demand a guarantee of about R2 billion from whoever stages a World Cup.

That sort of money can only really be stumped up by northern hemisphere nations and Australia.

But having put on some of the greatest sporting events ever held – Madiba’s 1995 Rugby World Cup at the dawn of democracy, the 2003 Cricket World Cup and the 2010 Football World Cup – there is no denying South African rugby fans feel tremendously hurt at being snubbed by WorldRugby.

That hurt is only made greater by the skullduggery that saw France snatching the hosting rights for next year’s World Cup, after WorldRugby’s own evaluation committee had recommended South Africa.

But when it came to the WorldRugby council voting on the issue, the powerful European bloc backed France. The worse betrayal of all came from Rugby Africa, the continental body which has its offices in Cape Town, paid for by SA Rugby, and who also voted for France.

Much like in African football, there is a growing sense of north African teams seizing power and aligning themselves with the old colonial power of France.

In a decision WorldRugby chairman Bill Beaumont, the former England captain, said would “accelerate the growth and impact of rugby globally”, Australia were awarded the 2027 World Cup and the USA the 2031 edition. The next three Women’s World Cups (2025, 2029 & 2033) will be hosted by England, Australia and the USA.

Apart from an obvious trend towards favouring the Anglosphere, the USA are hardly a rugby power. Their women may be ranked seventh in the world, but the men’s game is still taking baby steps.

Major League Rugby has been on the go in America since 2017 and the sport is growing in the world’s biggest commercial market. But the USA would be the weakest team to ever host the World Cup and they still only attract around 20 000 people to their home matches.

Sevens rugby is their most popular format, with nine million TV viewers for the Rugby World Cup Sevens in San Francisco in 2018.

One can argue giving Australia a World Cup is also helping the development of the game because Rugby Union is perpetually fighting a battle for prominence in a country that prefers Aussie Rules and Rugby League. Especially with the Wallabies slowly drifting away from rock-bottom and their union admitting that hosting the World Cup will basically save them from going bankrupt.

Having been kind enough to help Australia out of their financial hole, one hopes WorldRugby will show the same generosity and offer the same opportunities to New Zealand and South Africa, historically the most important rugby nations.

But it will be at least 40 years between World Cups for South Africa, and New Zealand are lagging in the sporting arms race when it comes to the capacity of their stadiums, the size of their population and technological advancement.

Oh, and don’t forget that both these great nations cannot pour enough of that all-important cash into WorldRugby’s greedy coffers.

For the first couple of years of Jake White’s tenure at Loftus Versfeld, the Bulls were always first or second on the log as they dominated their domestic rivals, but the United Rugby Championship has posed a much sterner challenge for them, and their director of rugby is delighted with the character they have shown in climbing from the basement of the log into sixth place now, with a quarterfinal spot confirmed.

Their hard-fought 29-17 bonus point victory over Glasgow Warriors in Pretoria at the weekend means the Bulls, with 53 points, now cannot be bumped out of the top eight by either Scarlets (44pts) or Ospreys, who have two games in hand but only have 39 points.

“In all our other tournaments we were generally first or second on the log from the start, but we’ve now had to play catch-up and get bonus points and I’m obviously very happy that we’ve shown lots of character,” White said.

“We were second-last with just 14 points after six rounds, so it’s first prize really to be in the playoffs. We’re not worried where we play them, we’re just happy to get in.

“We didn’t play well overall, but we played really well at times. We didn’t really play with a lot of rhythm or tempo because it was a game of stop/start and it looked like the waterboys were on all the time.

“That broke our momentum and the tempo looked terrible. There was also a bit of naivety in terms of game-management, we let the opposition back in the game again,” White said.

Glasgow coach Danny Wilson spoke about how having massive lumps of beefy Bulls flesh constantly battering them had “taught us a lesson about another level of physicality” and White said the home side only really picked up momentum when they started “wrestling” the visitors.

“Not many teams run a side like Glasgow to pieces so today’s challenge was to wrestle them. It suited us to play that way and it was a great learning experience for the team,” White said.

“Against a side that does not give you much space, time or opportunity, that’s what was needed in this game. There were certain things we did poorly in terms of execution, but we found a way to win.

“We wrestled them when we had to, but having wrestled and wrestled them, we then suddenly went to a different style and that can come back and bite you,” White said.

The sum of their situation though is that it is almost impossible for the Bulls to finish any higher than third, even if they beat Ospreys with a bonus point on May 20 in Swansea.

Munster are currently second on 56 points and will be underdogs when they visit defending champions Leinster in the final round, but the Sharks (56pts) visit Ulster (55pts), with the Bulls needing a draw in that match and for the Scarlets to beat the Stormers (56pts).