Ken Borland

Springbok great Bryan Habana spent enough time playing in Europe to know exactly what it would entail for South African rugby to ditch Sanzaar and move into Northern Hemisphere competitions, and the 2007 World Cup winner is not totally sold on the idea, he said on Wednesday.

There has been global speculation that the world champions will leave Sanzaar after the 2023 World Cup to play in an expanded Six Nations tournament as well as their SuperRugby franchises joining European competitions like the Pro14 and Champions Cup. There has also been talk emanating from Australia of Sanzaar excluding teams from both South Africa and Argentina and focusing on just a trans-Tasman competition with New Zealand.

Habana, who scored a South African record 56 SuperRugby tries for the Bulls and Stormers, finished his career spending five years playing for Toulon so he has intimate knowledge of European competition.

“There’s been a lot of debate about South Africa joining the Northern Hemisphere but right now nobody even knows when rugby will be back in South Africa. Probably the one thing most needed by rugby is a global season. But I suppose the one question is whether Sanzaar need SA Rugby, they have been an important part of Sanzaar for the last 25 years.

“For those in the UK and Europe it’s much easier to watch games in South Africa than those in New Zealand or Australia. But it’s important to see where the Springboks and SuperRugby teams could fit in and they would have to fit in with the Northern Hemisphere schedule. I don’t see our guys enjoying playing in 5⁰ in December/January and how are our rugby fans going to enjoy watching rugby over Christmas when they’re on holiday?” Habana said on Wednesday in a virtual press conference to announce the launch of MatchKit.co, a mobile tech platform intended to help athletes grow their commercial brands, set up by the Retroactive agency of which he is a partner.

There have also been suggestions South African teams could play in both Sanzaar and the Northern Hemisphere, expanding the current involvement of the Free State Cheetahs and the Southern Kings in the Pro14, but Habana said the workload on the players even if they were just involved in Europe would be immense.

“When Toulon won the double in 2014/15 they played more than 40 games and player welfare is important. If we’re going to add four more teams and include the Springboks in the Six Nations then that would mean even more matches. There are advantages to both hemispheres, the players would learn more about foreign conditions and that allows you to develop more as a rugby player and as a person.

“To say who has the better standard of play though is very subjective because what determines a good standard? The Northern Hemisphere has come strongly to the fore in the last few years: In the 2015 World Cup the top four sides were all from the Southern Hemisphere, but in 2019 it was very different [England, New Zealand, Wales, South Africa]. Hopefully our decision-makers will choose what is best for the game as a whole,” Habana said.

Highly-rated batsman Theunis de Bruyn may have just lost his Proteas contract but the 27-year-old has enough perspective to know there are far more important issues at hand at the moment and he is confident a rotten 2019/20 summer for him personally is just a hiccough in a career that has promised so much.

While the Covid-19 pandemic brought the cricket season to a shocking, sudden halt, De Bruyn feels as if he didn’t really have a cricket season at all. From the time he scored 41 for SA A against India A in Mysore last September, he has batted just 20 times this summer.

His problems started in the Mzansi Super League in November when he was hospitalised with a mystery virus. Then in the Momentum One-Day Cup he had just scored a brilliant 120 against the Lions at Centurion when he tore a hamstring in the field. In his first net practice back, he was coming to the end of his session when he was too early on a pull against Junior Dala and suffered a concussion.

His last innings for the Proteas was back in October in the third Test against India in Ranchi, when, ironically, De Bruyn was the top-scorer as he made 30 out of a dismal total of 133 all out. And now he has lost his national contract.

So the 2019/20 season has exacted a heavy fee on his good humour.

“It was just one of those seasons and I have no answers to the questions why? But we need to put the situation in perspective with what is currently going on: we can’t even play cricket now, businesses are closing and it’s a crazy time. We can only hope this pandemic unites the nation and then we can stand up and rebuild. So we need to take all that on board for perspective.

“But this last season was completely not what I expected, not what I put in all the hard work towards. The current situation is a bit like my season, all questions and no answers. I’ve hardly played this season, it feels like the season never really started for me. I feel a bit forgotten but I just have to take it on the chin because I failed in international cricket. But at the end of the day the passion is still there and I will take on the new season,” De Bruyn told The Citizen on Tuesday.

The Titans star admitted it has been a tough time to get through, but he has already been putting in hard work to ensure he comes back next season as an even better player.

“I’ve figured a few things out as to how I can improve as a cricketer, to become a more complete package physically, mentally and technically. This season has been so tough, but then I had setbacks when I was young, not making a provincial team, and it makes you want to give up and then the next season you have the time of your life.

“I believe I still have a role to play in South African cricket, I still have eight-to-ten years left in my career so there’s still a lot of time. I’m just going to take all the lessons I can from this season. In the few innings I had, I actually felt good and what I have been working on was coming through. It’s the first time I’ve failed in my career but now I can help the Titans rebuild and get better, which is what I love. Plus I have the chance to watch all the cricket highlights on TV that I haven’t had the chance to see before,” De Bruyn said.

https://citizen.co.za/premium/2260168/bigger-things-are-happening-theunis-chilled-over-proteas-snub/

Nielsen Sports, the provider of analytics for the sports industry, recently gave their annual presentation on the biggest trends in sports business and the two major talking points over the last year are the rise of e-Sports and the fact that sports bodies and their sponsors have to know who their fans are in this rapidly evolving marketplace.

Their research shows that, on average, only 10-15% of any sport’s fans are actually ‘game experts’ – people who have intimate knowledge of the rules, history, players, tactics etc. So any sports body or sponsor that only targets this section of the fan base are clearly missing out, for instance, on the 30-35% of ‘connection fans’ – for them it’s about the big event and they are the people packing out the stadia for Pink Day, the Cape Town Sevens rugby or the Durban July.

In the past, the relationship between a sport and a brand was based on the sponsor wanting visibility and the sport just wanting money. But this relationship is now much broader and the rights a sports body sells need to be more flexible and more tailored to their specific partners. Sponsors these days want to own stories and content rules in this digital age in which internet advertising spend overtook that for TV worldwide last year.

It was disappointing to hear that our traditional sports like rugby and cricket are battling to grow in this environment. In South Africa, 25% fewer millennials are interested in rugby, and cricket has seen the same drop in support.

The fastest growing sport in the world is e-Sports, which is basically what professional, competitive gaming is called, and unfortunately, rugby and cricket just don’t have games on the market that are good enough. Research has shown that there is a strong crossover between people who play the virtual game on their computers and supporting the actual ‘live’ sport. For instance, Fifa’s eWorldCup drew seven million gamers last year and Formula One enjoyed similar success with their eSports Final, the winner of which gained a one-year contract as a simulator driver for McLaren.

That e-Sports is rapidly evolving into a major player in the sports industry is shown by the fact that one-third of all their fans came onboard in the last year and they are typically millennial men with money to spend. Which means major global brands like Gillette, C-Smart and Mercedes are moving into that space, the higher LSM also attracting sponsors like Audi and Mountain Dew. Gaming is a $32 billion industry now and at the competitive level it is a mega-production, a whole show with adverts, sponsored decks and kids packed into stadia.

This year’s Overwatch League features 12 franchises based in cities like Boston, London and Shanghai who paid $20 million each to participate. The broadcast rights were sold for $90 million and the average audience is 280 000 per minute.

Speaking of broadcast rights, this field has also become extraordinarily broad for sponsors and sports bodies. Pay TV’s influence is still stable, but there are disruptors now in the picture, especially tech giants like Amazon and Facebook and even Twitter.

The cellphone has become a way of life and we are living in a mobile-first generation. Although high data costs hold us back in South Africa, 20% of local football viewers watch via internet streams, with 69% of those people watching the game live and 42% of those watching the whole game.

Rugby has 25% of its viewers streaming the game, 68% of that watching live and 48% for the whole game; cricket’s figures are 22% streaming, 78% of that live and 40% watching the full game.

The sports industry is certainly a very fluid environment for rights-holders and sponsors to get their heads around.

https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/the-citizen-kzn/20180623/282484299488829