The sky blue seats in the East Stand glared with intent in the Highveld's late afternoon sun here yesterday.
As you can deduce, a great many weren't occupied, partly because of events with weightier significance elsewhere, but mostly because of the growing perception that the Currie Cup has lost its shine.
It is true that few contests in this year's instalment have had the unremitting intensity and energy of seasons long gone, but the competition still provides its fair share of thrills and spills.The error-ridden but exhilarating passage of play that ended with replacement Rosko Specman trying to run out of his own goal area before relenting with a poor touch finder with 12 minutes to go, said it all.
It was a match of gaffes and guffaws, or fun and farce. The Blue Bulls and the Cheetahs would have been forgiven for extracting the see-saw's splinters from their backsides at the final whistle after the lead had changed hands on eight occasions.
Who won you may ask, and that in itself is a long tale.
After sustained pressure the Cheetahs scored in the 85th minute when their star import Makazole Mapimpi crashed over in the left-hand corner. Given both teams' lack of application in the tackle, perhaps a deuce scoreline would have been more fitting.
As has been a theme in this season's competition, porous defence was again the order of the day. It meant slick operators on either side like Mapimpi, Warrick Gelant, Sergeal Petersen, Specman, William Small-Smith and Jamba Ulengo found space and opportunity aplenty.
While Mapimpi's first-half effort when he jinked and sped away from four defenders was the undoubted highlight in that half, he owed his second after the break to his persistence and a deplorable lack of awareness and application by Tony Jantjies and Gelant.
Jantjies would have walked off with the sinking feeling that he had two eminently goalable conversions charged down. The four points cost the Bulls...