SA Rugby president Mark Alexander has dismissed reports that South African clubs could pull out of the Investec Champions Cup.
Speaking after SA Rugby’s annual meeting in Cape Town last week, Alexander said that all competitions involving South African teams were under review.
While Alexander did not specifically mention the Champions Cup or second-tier Challenge Cup, the possibility of South African teams withdrawing from EPCR competitions was reportedly being discussed internally.
However, Alexander told News24 on Monday that this was “speculation” and that the goal of a scheduled July review was “a negotiated balance” between competition commitments.
“We’ve only got so many weeks in a year,” he said.
“We play for 11 months in a year and nowhere else do they do that. We can continue going like this until we implode, or we can find another way of doing it.
“We have our international calendar and our URC and EPCR calendar. It creates a bottleneck for our player downtime, and that means our players are not available for either the franchises or South Africa at some point in time.”
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Alexander also reaffirmed South Africa’s commitment to the Rugby Championship, while urging for it to be played at the same time as the Six Nations in February and March.
“World Rugby has been speaking about a global calendar for the last 14 years now. A global calendar would help us,” he said.
“If we played the Rugby Championship at the same time as Six Nations, that frees up a lot of space on the calendar.
“That’s where the problem starts, but it’s unique to South Africa because we play in the south and the north.”
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