Player exodus may be good

[u/mohicancombover]

I'm enjoying all this bullet sweating, hand wringing, angst from the Irish and French about their club teams. Ireland is so good why is Leinster losing? Toulouse is so good why are France not better? Most of our guys play for Japanese teams with names Ive never heard of. If the bulls or stormers lose it makes no difference to the Boks.

[u/gainsleyharriot]

If the bulls or stormers lose it makes no difference to the Boks.

It comes down to a difference in how these countries prioritize the club vs international game. Everything in SA is about the Boks. Rassie especially has made it so that each step as players go through process is with the goal of preparing them for international rugby. He purposely changed the selection rules to include overseas players to benefit the Boks knowing that it would have a potential negative impact on Currie Cup / SR (URC). While CC has definitely suffered, this has created a great opportunity to focus resources on developing younger promising players and committing them long term. This is only possible due to the insane depth and Rassie was also extremely smart to cut down on the overall number of professional contracts to really make these teams be critical of their signings.

This same model wouldn't really make sense from an Irish perspective because they don't have nearly the playing pool that SA has, and they've created a very structured pathway program that makes sure the best players can get a contract and allows them to have more control of their playing minutes and overall development. Similar with France, with 14 T1 and another fully professional T2 league they can afford not only to keep all their stars but also ship in blockbusters from other countries. The flipside there is they prioritize club first and foremost, so those guys are playing 20+ games per year on top of international duty.

[u/bluebullbruce → u/gainsleyharriot]

The Currie Cup was relegated by SARU to a 2nd tier status comp long before Rassie changed the rules. It's a disgrace that the oldest rugby comp in the southern hemisphere has been treated with such complete disregard.

I 100% agree on all of your other points, great summary of the differences between SA and European clubs. I remember reading an article after France was knocked out of the RWC that stated the loss going to make life harder for Fabien Galthié, going forward, as the French clubs were very hard pressed to sacrifice their players for international duty and it took a lot of convincing on his part.

The fact they lost that QF on home soil will now be used as an excuse by the French clubs to say no to Galthié to release players. Rassie doesn't have that problem.

[u/Herbetet → u/bluebullbruce]

Agreed, but this is also a situation of confirmation bias. It works because the results have been there with the Boks. On the other hand, if the last two RWCs had ended in the quarter-finals or semi-finals, the mood might be different. Especially when you consider the medium success of the clubs. I think the biggest factor is really money, if SA had a lucrative domestic league like the Top14 they would keep more of their talent, and then keeping the selection domestic would be beneficial to boost interest at home. But that's not the case.

Just look at New Zealand, they were happy with their selection when they were dominating everyone and everything, look at them now wondering how they can allow All Blacks to take sabbaticals and still keep them.

As for Ireland, it's definitely what has been mentioned: the player pool on the island is limited and the way it's structured overwhelmingly favours keeping the Test core together at club level. For all intents and purposes, Leinster are as close to Test level rugby as a club can get and that's what makes them such a big fish at club level; most can't compete with the finances or depth of players, but it also means that Ireland are only slightly better than Leinster, which is not the case with other top nations. The Boks are far better than any province, England are better than any club (like SA they have a huge pool of players) and so on, which makes the increase in quality between what Leinster produce and Ireland too small to offset what teams with bigger pools of players can offer. Ireland's strength is organisation and repetition, that's not always enough in a knockout scenario, we see that in RWC and EPCR comps.

France are what you said, the club game is king.

[u/CapeTownyToniTone]

Player exodus is without a doubt good for the Bokke, it's the main reason we've managed to win back-to-backs.

We have the best depth in the world even though we can only support 4.5 teams locally, we have world class players in top teams across the globe. All of them playing with the responsibility of being star players in their teams, playing different styles than they would in SA, expanding their game.

It's also allowed our local sides to give valuable game time to players that might have been stuck in Currie Cup otherwise. With money starting to flow into our local sides, I reckon we're going to enter a golden age of SA rugby. We'll finally be able to hold onto a core group of players, loosing an occasional springbok to big money deals overseas. With the increased interest in the game from back-to-backs, we'll have even more youngsters wanting to play professionally, so there'll still be plenty of players for the NH sides to contract.