SARU President Mark Alexander has called for a fundamental rethink of how a future Rugby's Greatest Rivalry Tour would be structured in South Africa, pointing to poor midweek attendances and the awkward timing of franchise games as the main problems with the current format.
Speaking on the fringes of Wednesday's RGR Trophy reveal, Alexander told supersport.com that a full review would follow the fourth Test in Baltimore on 12 September, but that several issues had already been identified. Chief among them: midweek fixtures against URC franchises, played barely three weeks into those teams' pre-seasons and without a host of their Springbok players, have failed to draw the crowds the tour needs.
The midweek match in Durban attracted only 14,000 spectators, and Alexander acknowledged that ticket sales for next Tuesday's Lions game are also soft. "The midweek games don't work," he said. "The weekend games seem to have done well, both the weekend games."
For any future tour, Alexander wants the provincial opposition replaced with a stronger composite format. "Maybe look at playing big teams like an SA A team and an SA Country Districts team — having teams like the teams playing in the SA Cup, a big team, giving those boys a chance," he said, framing it explicitly as a pathways issue for players outside the franchise system.
Alexander was also keen to spread future fixtures more broadly across the country, taking games to areas not covered by the current tour.
Despite the midweek struggles, he maintained that the test component has been a commercial success, with all Springbok Tests in South Africa sold out. He estimated the tour's direct and indirect economic impact at $6.8 billion.
The broader structural problem, Alexander stressed, remains the absence of a global season. With New Zealand the key holdouts at SANZAAR level, scheduling tours of this nature will continue to create conflicts with the southern hemisphere's pre-season. He warned that failure to find alignment could have serious long-term consequences for the game. "If we don't find each other, somebody else will start another league and our players will be playing elsewhere," he said.