Coming home to a big event

Leave the country for just a few weeks and when you return the place is deurmekaar.

Western Province win the Currie Cup and Kaizer Chiefs are playing rugby.

You'll find no problems here with a WP victory, especially now that the previous triumph is lost in what has become a hazy memory. All I remember is that it was in 2001 (when we had 9/11) and now we have it in the year of Superstorm Sandy. No wonder Americans are wary of a Province team in the final. Next time it happens, they might go to Defcon One.

A Province-Chiefs Currie Cup final is still a long way off, although Amakhosi fielding a rugby team is not as unusual as it sounds. Barcelona have one and Demetri Catrakilis, one of the Province heroes, was once on the books of Moroka Swallows.

The crossover is not as difficult as it's often made out to be, even though Doc Craven made Stellenbosch University's soccer players do their stuff in the middle of the Matie rugby fields so they would have further to run when it started to rain.

It's uncertain what kind of rugby team Gcobani Bobo and Breyton Paulse will put onto the field once Kaizer Chiefs master the dark arts of the front row, but if it's anything like the one Province sent into the Shark Tank, the rest of the Premier Soccer League will quake in their boots. I can't imagine even Orlando Pirates standing up to the rolling maul; certainly not Sundowns, even with all their Loftus experience.

Sport should only be watched live on television but in the case of Province winning in absentia, special dispensation was found to do a kyk weer.

Most surprising (aside from the sheer chutzpah of beating the Sharks in Durban) was the way Province cleaned up in the lineouts. It would come as no surprise if the Sharks forwards were now wearing false beards and glasses.

One person who I know would have been very pleased with the outcome of the final was the WP fan I sat next to the last time these two teams met at King's Park. He was brave enough to wear the blue-and-whites in a sea of black-and-whites, who ribbed him gently but consistently. Province's effort on that day never helped; they were outplayed 30-10.

At the end of the 90 minutes of torture, one Sharks fan tried to sympathise: "Don't worry, mate. A bad weekend in Durban is better than a good one in Cape Town." I wonder how that Sharks fan felt about Durban two weekends ago?

The Province fan in question was a latecomer to the colours, so 2001 would have meant little to him. He is part of a generation in Cape Town for whom this year's victory was a first in their young experience of watching WP. How strange that seems for a province that used to dominate the competition (33 titles to the 23 of the next best Blue Bulls).

The upset result (for it was that) capped the best part of the season. The Currie Cup this year has been more entertaining, more exciting and more satisfying than all the highfalutin' Super 15, Four Nations and the rest thrown together.

The SA Rugby Union claims it broke all TV records, with an average of 525000 viewers watching the 33 matches; an increase of 36% on the 2011 season average. An average of 1.14 million viewers tuned in, with a peak audience of 1.3 million viewers.

One of those millions is an old Cape Town friend who views these events through blue-and-white-tinted glasses and can't understand why Deon Fourie is not in the Bok team. She had the final word on Catrakilis, who uncannily resembles a young Rowan Atkinson. Naas the Greek, she calls him.