What the heck is going on here? No, that was not my reaction to the Stormers shouting “open the gates” and letting Glasgow Warriors pour through them like a dam had been busted by a bouncing bomb last Friday night, but to an internet page that opened in front of me earlier that day.
The intention was to travel from Cape Town to Durban for the Sharks/Munster quarterfinal the next day, which I did, and then proceed to Loftus the following week if what I expected to happen did happen and both the Sharks and the Bulls won. Which of course they also did.
But what if the Sharks had fallen short, which they also very nearly did? Well, then there was the opportunity to retain the Durban beachfront accommodation booked for the week and head to this coming weekend’s school reunion.
The Sharks have beaten the Bulls twice in the #VURC already this season 👀 pic.twitter.com/xOyuAuKILC
— SuperSport Rugby (@SSRugby) June 4, 2025
My exclamation followed the googling of cheap flights back to Cape Town if I chose against going to Loftus and I went to Northwood v Hilton instead. The prices were more what you’d expect from a one way flight to Mauritius than a domestic flight.
There are other options because unlike most sane human beings I am not afraid of buses. And seeing that I no longer participate in the event that ramped up the flight prices from Durban next week, namely the Comrades Marathon, maybe I am not averse to getting my torture fix from a marathon bus journey home.
Anyway, it’s Comrades weekend in Durban, something you couldn’t fail to notice if you are sleeping nights on the beachfront this week. Many wise upcountry runners, and even wiser if you from Cape Town and want to get out of the cold, have been pounding the promenade in what I know from experience is an attempt to assuage guilt for suddenly following up a period of high training with days sans exercise during the taper.
You don’t really need to do those runs, but you do them because not doing them could do your head in. On Monday morning, the day after Comrades, the same runners out on the promenade, but this time hobbling like they’ve just marched back from a battle front and require some patching up by a modern day Florence Nightingale.
That used to be me in days that are thought back sometimes as mind-numbingly stupid when there is a mood of realism in the air, and at other teams seen as the halcyon days because I still knew what fitness was back then (never mind that Comrades exists for the sole purpose of breaking you).
THE COMRADES CONNECTION
Many ask Comrades runners why they run it. “Don’t you have a car?” My answer to that was that being brought up in KZN and being taken as a child to picnic spots along the route, waiting from the early hours with eager anticipation for the runners to emerge out of the darkness, forged a connection.
And while running it is a tortuous experience, you don’t really figure that out when you’re really young. If you can get round the school playground without getting fatigued, why not run from Durban to Maritzburg?
Yet there was still something heroic about the Comrades runners, and seeing I knew I never had the talent (or the guts) to become a Tommy Bedford, who was captaining the Natal rugby team in those years, or the Natal cricket captain Vincent van der Bijl, the Comrades was a way to satisfy a hunger to do something noteworthily sporty. Even if it just meant you’d become a hero to yourself.
The connection was always there, even once I was at varsity in Grahamstown watching the event on television. There was a time, before the Eastern Europeans started dominating, when I could roll out the names of every winner since Derek Preiss, a Westville runner who won back to back in 1974 and 1975.
It’s funny what you do remember. On the day of the 1976 run the family was heading home from a long weekend camping trip on the Transkei coast. We listened to updates on the radio but then the signal went, leaving me to at the age of just 10 to become properly acquainted for the first time with the truth behind the saying that you shouldn’t always believe everything you see in the newspapers.
When we got home, there was the Daily News waiting for us on the doorstep. It was an afternoon paper, meaning it would have been put together in the morning and sent out at around lunch time. That being a public holiday, maybe the staff finished work a little earlier, because a big headline proclaimed that Preiss had completed his hat-trick of wins.
So it was a surprise the next morning to see a pic of Alan Robb finishing as the winner at Hoy Park on the front page of The Natal Mercury. The race hadn’t finished yet when the Daily News was put to bed.
Robb became my favourite Comrades runner, not just because I hear he’s a Liverpool supporter, but because of his third win in 1978, where he became the first winner to break five and a half hours.
We went as a family to the finish at Kingsmead and when Robb came into the stadium he looked like he was running an 800 metre event. The words of the Radio Port Natal radio announcer, Sarel Marais, who was commentating on the event, still stick in my mind: “Ladies and gentleman, we are not watching a human being, we are watching a machine!”
That still rates as the best ever Comrades run and here’s why - Robb took the lead that year from around Botha’s Hill, or maybe even further away from Durban. When he got to the finish the second placed runner, the man known as “Dancing Dave Wright” because of his habit of waltzing at the finish, was 19 minutes behind him. Meaning that he wasn’t pushed.
The following year Piet Vorster broke his winning sequence but Robb was back in 1980 for a fourth win. We didn’t go to the route that year, because the race happened on a Saturday, and my school Northlands were playing Beachwood in our big derby fixture. But my dad had his transistor radio with him and we listened to the finish.
MORNE’S SHINER WOULD HAVE BEEN A MAJOR CONTROVERSY NOW
The reason the schools game was happening in the morning was because that day, 31 May 1980, just happened to also be the day that the big rugby test series between Morne du Plessis’ Springboks and Bill Beaumont’s British Lions (there was no ‘Irish’ in the name back then) began in Cape Town. There were four games in a series like that back then, with each test happening two weeks apart.
So we were home after the school first team game had been played in the early afternoon to watch that on television. Apart from the early tries from Rob Louw and I think Willie du Plessis that settled my nerves, and of course Divan Serfontein’s winning try at the end, the memory throws up the image of the Bok captain Du Plessis taking a big punch in the eye from Derek Quinnell in the early minutes.
It left Morne with a mighty shiner. If that happened today Quinnell would have been banned from the rest of the series, but I can’t recall there being any sanction, or even a media fuss.
Rugby was a different game back then, and so was the Comrades. There were probably only a few thousand running it. My dad died suddenly shortly before the 1981 Comrades but I still managed to get to the race, watching from Windsor Park with family friends who kindly invited me along as a Wits student named Bruce Fordyce ran past to cat calls from some as he was wearing a black armband.
The Comrades organisers had allowed the race to be absorbed into the Republic Festival celebrations, which for obvious reasons weren’t enjoyed by all, and Fordyce was quite right to protest.
Anyway, he dominated the race for the rest of the 1980s, until 1989 when he chose not to run and Sam Tshabalala ran past a cramping Willie Mtolo near Tollgate to become the first black winner. I was at varsity nervously preparing for a trip to King William’s Town, where my task was to inform my girlfriend’s religious parents that we had to get married, and there was a reason we needed to get married. As I say, it’s funny what you remember…
THE STARS MAY BE ALIGNING FOR THE SHARKS
Let’s talk about some rugby here because if I stick to running I might start feeling a bit like Bono from U2. As in “This song isn’t a rebel song, this song is Sunday bloody Sunday”. This column isn’t a rugby column… But it is. It’s also about how to get to rugby matches.
The thing about flying for an anxious flyer is that 48 and a half minutes out of Cape Town you are still looking at your watch and counting the seconds and feel like you have just levelled out from the climb. But then you feel better when you realise the plane has already reached a point in the journey that would take you 12 hours to get to if you were driving or in a bus. Meaning somewhere between Cradock and Queenstown.
Actually, Cradock isn’t called that anymore, it’s now called Nxuba. Coming to think of it, Queenstown is now called Komani. People who have lived there tell me Komani used to be the name of the town’s psychiatric hospital.
It was a cardiac ward rather than a psychiatric one that Sharks coach John Plumtree felt he might need after the penalty shootout that, because of the atmosphere it generated and its unique nature for a rugby match, made Kings Park the right place to fly to. Plum looked a bit all over the place in the post-match press conference and it was understandable. I saw him later in the evening and he was still getting over the trauma.
An 𝐀𝐋𝐋-𝐒𝐏𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐁𝐎𝐊 front row showdown? 🍿
— SuperSport Rugby (@SSRugby) June 4, 2025
The #VURC scrum battle at Loftus on Saturday is going to be intense 💥
Who will dominate the semi-final? pic.twitter.com/ZKk9T1r6jz
But here’s the thing, and it is a thing that I believe should concern the Bulls ahead of the Loftus clash - even before the kick out started somehow it was hard to believe the Sharks wouldn’t win it. They do manage to keep winning, and it drove a certainty that the Sharks would emerge from the shootout as the winners and Pretoria would have to be the destination this weekend if I wanted to be at a URC match.
The alternative had been a possible Durban semifinal but the Bulls put that one to bed while I was enjoying a good lunch with the Sharks marketing people and they beat Edinburgh. It has to be said that at stages of that first half, between mouthfuls of spatchcocked peri-peri chicken, it was hard to discern the Bulls from the Stormers the night before.
But they got it right in the end, as most of us sitting at the table knew they would. For apart from anything else, Jake is right - altitude matters.
SIXTH SENSES AREN’T ALWAYS RELIABLE
Before Sharks fans get excited about my sixth sense that they will win at Loftus, let it be pointed out that a similar sixth sense, as expressed in the supersport.com preview to the Glasgow/Stormers game, was that it would be a “SFM night”. Meaning Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu. Scotstoun was far from that. In fact, SFM, like the Stormers as a whole, got a bloody nose.
In my view Stormers coach John Dobson got a lot wrong in that game. Suleiman Hartzenberg used to look to me like a future star as a centre. Now he is looking more and more like a brilliant wing, but not a centre. I sense Dobson knows that, so it was confounding that he selected Hartzenberg there for such an important game.
Maybe my sixth sense is sometimes reliable after all, for there was also a feeling Dobson was making a mistake when he chose a much changed team for the final league game against Cardiff. There were several players at the Scotstoun that looked like what they were - players who hadn’t had game time in three weeks.
But all of this doesn’t mean that the baby should be thrown out with the dishwater and Dobson should come under threat for his job. Hell no, and here’s why…
STORMERS MIGHT ACTUALLY BE OVER ACHIEVING
That might seem the biggest load of bollocks to people who have read other writers who say the exact opposite. But it is true if you look at how the Stormers squad has actually quite bizarrely shrunk since they won the competition in 2022.
This year the Stormers had a squad of 57, next year it will be 45 or 44. The departure lounge has been more active for the Stormers in recent seasons than the arrivals hall. A policy of quantity over quality in contracting would have merit if it wasn’t that the Stormers play across two competitions, and three if you lump in the Currie Cup.
There are good players leaving, and disturbingly given one of the big parts of the Stormers’ identity, many of them are players of colour. Joseph Dweba, probably Wandisile Simelane, and we’re hearing Manie Libbok isn’t just going on sabbatical, he’s leaving for good. On top of that there are doubts that Frans Malherbe will play again, while Deon Fourie and Ruan Nel et al aren’t getting any younger.
The only incomers are Ntuthuko Mchunu and Cobus Reinach. Yes, there are good players coming through, like Paul de Villiers, Vernon Matongo, Jonathan Roche and Imad Khan, but you need experienced stars around to guide those youngsters or it is so much more difficult.
One thing the Stormers have got right is the connection with their DNA and connection with their fans. I was quoted this week from a conversation I had in the press box during one of the Stormers games, but there was a bit of distortion in the messaging.
There is a lot wrong with me and sometimes I forget to take my stupidity pills, but I am not dumb enough to think the Stormers, either the playing staff or the coaches, would think they could just go out and entertain and to hell with the result.
They got it horribly wrong on their big night, but far from thinking of them as an abject failure, I think the Stormers are succeeding where others fail. There’s no other franchise in the country, or maybe even in the URC, that is better connected to the rugby DNA of the region it represents. Some of the Stormers home games are like being at a rock concert in terms of the excitement generated by the entertainment delivered.
While it was great to be back at Kings Park with a proper atmosphere for the Munster game, and the Sharks are certainly making progress in all aspects of their business, imagine how many fans would have pitched up in Cape Town if it was the Stormers playing a playoff game against Munster. In Durban it was 25 000 and that was considered a lot. At DHL Stadium there’d probably have been twice that number. And that’s not guessing.
Indeed, while it was obviously considered safer to have Munster as opponents, and a routing to the final that kept the Sharks away from Leinster, I got the feeling from the Sharks marketing people at the weekend that they would have preferred to have been hosting the Stormers in terms of the draw to the game.
BOMBING COMRADES IS AS MUCH AN EXPERIENCE AS CELEBRATING THE FINISH
So let’s get back to the Comrades and the people stumbling along the pavement nine floors below me. Some of those people are going to fail. Which I did in my first Comrades. One of my abiding memories of that first run, if you could call it a run, is of seeing the then Proteas wicketkeeper Mark Boucher standing as a spectator at 45th Cutting.
There was a temptation to shout out to him, to thank him for once reversing roles and coming to watch me for a change. The only problem was that I wasn’t running by that point - it was a down run and we were seven kilometres from the end - but in the baling bus. And Boucher has never struck me as someone who has any time for losers.
Let me tell you there is no sorrier bunch of people than the people who sit in the baling bus - I didn’t actually bale, it was a technical bale, I made sure I was too late for one of the cut-off points so that I didn’t do the long distance runner’s equivalent of surrender.
Feeling bleak is how it should be. What’s the point of all that training if on the day you are going to treat falling short in your mission as if you are on laughing gas. The Comrades is probably the closest an Average Joe like me can come to actually feeling the kind of disappointment the Proteas for instance must have felt after the Allan Donald runout at Egbaston in 1999.
What the Stormers experienced last week should be akin to a DNF (Did Not Finish) in Comrades. The Lions, by not even making the playoffs, were like one of those runners who don’t even make it to the start.
Both the Sharks and the Bulls are well beyond the start point now. In Comrades parlance, they are beyond Drummond and heading towards the point where you either see the sea in the distance (from the top of the Fields Hill on the down run) or the hollow of Pietermaritzburg in the distance on the up run.
But getting so near and then falling short can be so much more agonising than if you just fail to pitch, like the Lions did. It’s going to be a dark and agonising night for one set of players and coaches on Saturday night. They should be inconsolable, with no pretending otherwise.
Having winners and losers is what makes sport the draw that it is. Fortunately, unlike the rugby players, my livelihood never depended on Comrades success, or I would have died of starvation ages ago. So maybe there was more fun in me embracing the feeling of failure than there would be for such highly competitive people.
But like the Comrades runners who fall short on Sunday, the loser at Loftus should see it as just part of a story that will hopefully be turned around later.
Good luck to the Comrades runners, and good luck to those who are vested in the Sharks or Bulls. Some of you are going to feel really miserable on Monday. That’s life. That’s sport. Embrace the misery and enjoy it.
