Community cup draw confirmed
Brakpan Rugby Club, the 2013 Cell C Community Cup bronze medal winners, recently completed their busy season with a semi-final defeat to the University of Johannesburg (UJ), in the cross-border Predator League.
The club can already look to the future with the confirmation of the pools for the toughest competition in community club rugby, the 2014 Community Cup.
The South African Rugby Union (SARU) made the pool draw for the much anticipated competition on Friday, August 23.
The draw was arrived at by ranking the 14 provinces, plus Limpopo, according to the order in which their clubs finished the 2013 Community Cup.
The final placings from the Easter Championships, in George (where Brakpan finished third), determined the top eight rankings, while places nine to 15 were decided by final log points after the tournament’s pool stages.
The five wild cards, which will be confirmed by SARU’s Games and Policies Committee in early October, once all provincial leagues are completed, will fill the remaining places in the 20-team draw.
The “Panne” have been drawn in Pool C and, according to chairman of the club Harry Nieuwenhuis, the club is not too concerned with the draw.
Pool C will have a distinctly northern-union feel to it, with the Valke Peregrine League champions up against Centurion, who finished as the top open club in the Blue Bulls’ Carlton League.
They will also play against the yet to be confirmed Limpopo and Boland champions, as well as a wild card team.
“The new season will bring new challenges and all the teams will be better equipped and trained to make it to the final weekend in April,” said Nieuwenhuis.
“We had success against last year’s Boland champions, Roses United, and we are ready to take on Centurion, a team who lost recently to Boksburg Rugby Club, in the Predator League.”
He added that the club do not know much about the teams in Limpopo, but said that the team should be able to win any game in order to proceed to the final stage over the Easter weekend, regardless of who their opposition are.
“We are not sure about who the wild card club will be, so that is a bit of a unknown factor,” he said.
“All 14 unions nominated clubs that could fill the last six wild card team places, so anything can happen and, at this stage, nobody knows who the final teams will be.
“We feel that we have had a positive draw and we know that we will be able to represent the Valke well again, in April, next year.”
