Former Springboks coach Nick Mallett has questioned the “point” of South African teams in the Investec Champions Cup if they cannot field their best sides.

This comes after South African franchises endured their worst weekend in the competition and the Challenge Cup with only the Lions notching up a win in the latter.

While the Sharks and Stormers shipped over 50 points in the UK, the Bulls were defeated at home by Northampton Saints in conditions that certainly favoured the hosts.

A shocking weekend for South African teams

Mallett did not hold back in his review of the weekend’s action dubbing it as “dreadful” and questioned why South African teams aren’t fielding their best players in the Champions Cup.

“That was a shocker and it was just a dreadful weekend for South Africa,” Mallett said on the Boks Office podcast.

“It started off with the Bulls, it was a 3 pm game, nice a hot day and everyone thought okay Northampton are going to struggle a little bit. The Bulls were all over them territorially and in possession but couldn’t hold on to a pass or create a try and ended up losing the game 30-20.

“I mean no one really had anticipated that result and you could see by the Northampton Saints’ players after the game, I mean, it felt like they’d won the World Cup, they were so happy – very, very frustrating from the Bulls’ point of view.

“Then two very weak sides being sent over by the Sharks and the Stormers and got 50 points each. So just a really disappointing weekend.”

The former Springboks boss pointed to how Leinster and Ireland managed the playing time of legendary fly-half Johnny Sexton to show that it is possible.

What doesn’t make sense to Mallett is why the teams are fielding their best players in the URC in order to qualify for the Champions Cup but when they are in the latter tournament, they rotate the squad.

“There are lots of things we need to talk about here just about the relevance of this competition for South African teams if we aren’t able to pick our strongest side to play in the strongest competition, what’s the point?” he continued.

“You’re getting sides like Ireland [Leinster] that would pick Johnny Sexton only for European Cup games and internationals and he wouldn’t play URC games. We’re playing our Springboks to try and get into this European Cup and then we take our Springboks out when they go and play an away game in the Investec Champions Cup. That doesn’t make sense to me.”

The Champions Cup should be targeted

Former Stormers head coach and Springboks centre Robbie Fleck agreed with his ex-coach and said that South African teams should be targeting the tournament as they are more than capable of winning it.

“So what is the premier competition in the world? The Champions Cup. So surely we should be targeting that competition. I mean without a doubt it’s better than Super Rugby these days, it’s better than the Top 14, English Premiership, URC, everything, so we should be trying to win that competition – that is the premier club competition in the world and we’re playing against the best teams, the best coaches so let’s plan for that,” he said.

“I get that and I agree with Nick why are we not targeting that competition because we’re certainly capable of winning it and I know there’s lots into the travel whatever, but it’s still early days in the competition, we’ve only really travelled once but we’re losing home games and we’re losing games overseas that we should be winning.

“Obviously, the Stormers are quite depleted but surely they should be focusing on putting a very, very strong team together to win this competition, they’ve won the URC and it’s proven that South African teams are dominating the URC, surely we can compete in this and lose one or two URC games. Rest our players in the URC to be able to compete in both.”

“A very important point”

However, Mallett is sympathetic to the challenges of the Springboks who effectively play year-round, with South Africa playing club rugby in the northern hemisphere and the Rugby Championship in the south.

“A very important point is that the Springboks play all year round, the URC and the Champions Cup players go on a June-July tour to the southern hemisphere then they put their feet up until the end of July, August and they kick off slowly in September – then the guys start playing again,” Mallett said.

“Our blokes go straight into the Rugby Championship after the July tour and it’s tough you have two against Argentina, two against Australia, two against New Zealand and on top of that you’re having alignment camps all over the place. So your Springboks – the squads that he takes to the alignment camps are 45 players – the guys are getting just flooded with rugby at the moment.

“Any international player when he comes back from the northern hemisphere tour at the end of the year must just want to say ‘I don’t want to see a rugby ball or a coach or rugby field for another two months just give me December and January off completely’ and we can’t do that we just don’t do it because you come back and the franchises have now got a knife to the throat, they’re saying why aren’t we winning you know we need to get guys in, the stadiums need to be full over Christmas, we’ve got to play our Boks – you cannot whip the horse all year round.”