SARU President Mark Alexander has called for a fundamental rethink of how a future Rugby's Greatest Rivalry tour is structured, identifying midweek provincial fixtures and scheduling conflicts caused by the misaligned seasons as the two most significant problems with the current format.
Speaking on the fringes of the RGR Trophy reveal on Wednesday, Alexander said a formal review of the tour will take place after the fourth and final test in Baltimore on 12 September, but that several issues have already been identified.
The midweek fixture in Durban drew only 14 000 spectators, and ticket sales for next Tuesday's Lions clash — the tour's second and final midweek match — are also lagging. Alexander acknowledged that the Lions game is squeezed between two tests, making it a difficult sell from the outset.
"The midweek games don't work," Alexander said. "The weekend games seem to have done well, both the weekend games."
The root cause, he argued, is the scheduling reality: the URC franchises are barely three weeks into pre-season when the All Blacks arrive, and are operating without large numbers of their Springbok players. His proposal for future tours is to use a South African Country Districts composite side or teams drawn from the SA Cup or Currie Cup, where players are properly match-ready.
"It's about pathways and I think we need to create those pathways for the guys who don't have the opportunity to play at this level," he said.
Alexander was clear that the provincial struggles have not overshadowed the test series, which has been a commercial success. All South African tests have sold out, and he put the direct and indirect economic impact of the tour at $6.8 billion.
Beyond the immediate tour, Alexander pointed to the absence of a global season as the deeper structural problem. New Zealand remain the key holdouts within SANZAAR, and Alexander warned that failure to resolve the misalignment carries serious long-term consequences for the sport.
"We'll be foolish if we don't find a global season, find a season that works for all of rugby. Because if we don't find each other, somebody else will start another league and our players will be playing elsewhere," he said.
He expressed cautious optimism that the Nations Championship framework, which groups the world's top 12 nations, could provide the platform to finally reach an agreement.