Jean de Villiers believes the Vodacom United Rugby Championship should benefit from the recent Guinness Six Nations action, in particular through the return of a confident group of Italian players to their teams while a far from settled Wales team still clearly offers plenty of opportunities for the Welsh players in the competition to vie for Test spots.
Only a few weeks after De Villiers declared that Italian Test rugby is benefitting from URC exposure, the Italians claimed a shock 31-29 victory over Scotland in a fourth round of upsets in the Six Nations last weekend.
“The Italian players will return to the United Rugby Championship with a lot of confidence after probably the best campaign an Italian side has had in this competition, with a week still to go. That will hopefully also lift the performances of Benetton Rugby – who are still there and thereabouts – and Zebre Parma in the URC,” said De Villiers.
When the URC returns to action on 22 March, De Villiers also believes the Welsh players have perhaps the most to gain.
“The Welsh players probably have the most to play for when the URC resumes. I think this is a Welsh team that is not that settled in terms of their best starting team, so there is a lot to play for when these players return to their clubs and compete in the URC. Hopefully that will see the standard of the Welsh clubs improve.
“And then Scotland and Ireland have been performing well. So, I think the way the Six Nations has panned out will further lift the quality and product of the upcoming games we’ll see in the URC.”
Reflecting on the past weekend’s Six Nations action, De Villiers said it highlighted again the beauty of the unpredictability of sport.
“It was a very exciting weekend of Six Nations rugby. All three games gave the fans something to cheer about. At least two out of the three results I didn’t expect but it shows again the beauty of rugby that if you’re a little bit off on the day the opposition can get the better of you. It also shows that teams are getting better, specifically Italy. Scotland were probably the dark horses for the competition this year and suddenly Italy showed they can compete with the big dogs.
“There’s also no better motivation than people just writing you off totally and that happened from an English point of view. They had so much to prove and on the day, they were able to execute and perform.”
Comments