Brenden Nel

ridiculous travel schedules for teams but that's that's another story so from that that was the answer and he said what we're doing is in july every july we have a workshop and we review all our competitions with all the stakeholders broadcast the sponsors and we see what works and what doesn't work and if we have to drop converse competitions we will

And so that's how it started.

One report in South Africa, the line said, although Mr. Alexander didn't mention Champions Cup, my sources tell me that they're talking about withdrawing.

And that was the headline.

And that was picked up by the Times in London.

And then suddenly we all, to be honest, Marty, if we withdraw from the Champions Cup,

First of all, it won't do a thing for player welfare.

It's four weekends in December and January.

And then it's March three, four weekends for the knockout games, which the South African teams haven't done very well.

So they haven't got that for mostly.

So that first of all, it does nothing for player welfare.

Second of all, South Africans pay 290 million rand a year to buy into a shareholding in EPCR.

It took them three years.

In those three years, they couldn't host home playoff games.

They had to play them in Europe.

And now, this year, they are a fully-fledged shareholder.

That's close to a billion rand that they put into their competition.

It doesn't make sense to say you're going to walk away from it just with that.

What do you do then?

The teams get 40 million each out of Europe now.