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Returning to watch live sport, after two years of COVID-19 enforced crowd absence, has been one of my highlights of 2022.

The Stormers won the inaugural United Rugby Championship (URC) on home turf, the Springboks gave the Welsh a hiding, and Cape Town Stadium showed why a move away from Newlands was the right thing to do.

You lose a lot of history but you gain the ability to grab a beer or meal in a hurry and use toilet facilities that aren’t, at best, a total mess.

The upcoming Stormers URC season has hit a bit of a speedbump, though, with news that the team won’t be able to play all of its matches at Cape Town Stadium.

As The Daily Maverick points out, the Biebs is partly to blame:

As defending URC champions, the Stormers will have to make way at their Green Point base for Justin Bieber concerts, the Cape Town Sevens and a Monster Truck event.

Although this sounds like the set up to a punchline for a joke, it’s a reality for the Cape side after a delay in the finalising of fixtures for the new season created the issue.

Despite the Stormers’ winning the inaugural URC, the Western Province Rugby Football Union (WPRFU) remains in administration after it faced financial collapse late last year.

Okay, blaming Justin Bieber is harsh when people like Zelt Marais basically sunk the WPRFU through sheer incompetence and petty internal power struggles which cost the union huge sums of money it didn’t have in the first place.

The union does not own the Cape Town Stadium. The City of Cape Town does, and concerts and events are major revenue generators that can’t be turned down.

The reality of being tenants at a stadium was laid bare for the Stormers and while the union has put a positive spin on the situation by using its social media platforms to say “taking the team to more fans”, from a marketing perspective it breaks momentum.

The clash of dates means that the Stormers will play their first two home games of the season in Stellenbosch, at the Danie Craven Stadium.

In addition, the Stormers and Dragons match on December 3 will be played at the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium so that the Cape Town Stadium can ready itself for the HSBC Cape Town Sevens.

The Monster Jam monster truck show – you know, the ones with that awful ad on SuperSport – will see the Stormers play a third match in Stellenbosch in April next year.

On the subject of adverts, can somebody please tell SuperSport and Capitec to sort out the volume on the bank’s advert? It’s totally out of synch with the levels of the rest of the broadcast, plays multiple times every match, and I’m not alone in my frustrations:

We digress.

Rugby fans in Stellenbosch will no doubt be delighted that they won’t have to travel to Cape Town to watch the Stormers in action.

Perhaps some fans will go the other way, relive their younger days, and end up at Springboks Pub, where more bad decisions are made than a Bryce Lawrence World Cup quarter-final refereeing performance.

Don’t forget that the Boks play the Wallabies in the Rugby Championship on Saturday morning, with kickoff at 7:30AM.

[source:dailymav]