It is Tuesday, and we owe you this one. The Final Whistle should have landed on Monday and did not, so the URC round 2 results reach you a day late, with the benefit of a night’s sleep on a weekend that pulled South African fans in two directions at once.
If you watched from your own couch, in your own time zone, you had a good weekend. If you stayed up for the games in Scotland and Ireland, you went to bed muttering. And if you were still up for Cairo on Sunday night, you watched a Bafana Bafana side full of unfamiliar names do the thing Pitso Mosimane’s teams keep doing: win.
So, no scoreboard reading. Here is what the weekend meant.
The big weekend theme: URC round 2 results split along the equator
Line up the four rugby scores and the pattern jumps off the page. At home, South African sides were ruthless. Away, they came close and came home with a single point each.
On Friday night the Stormers lost 17-13 to Edinburgh at the Hive Stadium, in a swirling wind that turned the game into an arm wrestle. On Saturday the Lions beat the Ospreys 35-19 at 10bet Ellis Park, the Sharks beat Leinster, the reigning champions, 26-20 at Hollywoodbets Kings Park, and Munster beat the Bulls 26-22 at Thomond Park.
Two bonus-point wins at home. Two four-point defeats on the road. Neither touring side was blown away: the Stormers were ahead with a quarter of an hour to play, and the Bulls went into the break level at 14-14.
The easy conclusion is that the northern trip is hard and home is where the points live. True, but lazy. The URC is a long season, and how you lose away matters almost as much as whether you win at home. On that measure, all four franchises came out of the weekend in better shape than a 2-2 split suggests, and the two that lost will feel they left something on the field.
What we took from it
1. Best performance: the Lions after half-time
The Lions went in at the break 12-10 down to the Ospreys at Ellis Park. Then they won the second half 25-7.
Six tries in all: Erich Cronjé, PJ Botha, Morné Brandon, Boeta Chamberlain and two for Kelly Mpeku, with the Ospreys’ Dan Edwards sent to the sin bin in the second half. Only one of those six tries was converted, which tells you how freely the Lions were getting over the line. A side that kicks one conversion from six and still wins by 16 has been the better team by a distance.
It makes two wins from two for the Lions, who sit third on nine points, one behind the leaders. Their reward is a trip to Loftus on Saturday. They will go there believing.
2. Biggest concern: closing games on the road
The Stormers and the Bulls lost in different ways, but the ending was the same.
In Edinburgh, Hacjivah Dayimani, named man of the match by his club, scored from a powerful scrum to put the Stormers 13-10 up. They could not hold it. Edinburgh’s flyhalf James Grayson threw a long pass wide, replacement Rory McHaffie dived over in the corner and Grayson converted from the touchline. The Stormers’ last throw of the dice was a penalty to the corner, and Edinburgh won the lineout. It also spoiled the night of Siya Kolisi’s return in Stormers colours.
In Limerick, the Bulls were level at half-time and scored three tries of their own, through Ruan Vermaak, Francois Klopper and Jeandré Rudolph, but Munster scored four. Charlie O’Shea, making his first competitive start for Munster, scored two of them. It was the Bulls’ first URC defeat of the season, and IOL’s report blamed soft penalties that kept sending them back into their own half.
3. The Sharks beat the champions
Durban’s result deserves a column of its own, and it has one: Beyond the Score, at 12:00 today, explains why the Sharks beat Leinster and what the returning Springboks change before Cape Town.
The short version: 26-20, four tries to three, a bonus point, and Edwill van der Merwe’s interception try near the end to settle it. Coach JP Pietersen was not getting carried away. “We’ll take this win, but I’m a realist and this wasn’t Leinster’s best of the best,” he said in the Sharks’ own reaction piece.
4. Cairo: new faces, same result
Mosimane promised wholesale changes for the friendly against Egypt, and he made them, bringing in several players who had not featured against Guinea or Eritrea. It did not matter. Puso Dithejane scored early in the second half, pouncing after Egypt’s goalkeeper came off his line and misjudged it, and finishing into an empty net. It was his first international goal and Bafana’s third win in a row.
“I let them swim with the sharks, threw them in the deep end. Yeah, they swam, hey?” Mosimane said afterwards, according to SAFA. For a coach with an AFCON 2027 qualifying campaign still to finish, depth that wins away in Egypt is worth more than one result.
5. One thing you may have missed: the point each that came home
Both away defeats were by four points, inside the seven-point margin that earns a losing bonus point. That is why the Stormers and the Bulls both sit on six points after two rounds, not five. It sounds small. Over a long league season, single points like these add up.
And a footnote from Cairo: SAFA says President Cyril Ramaphosa, in Egypt for an African Union meeting, visited the changeroom before kick-off and watched from the stands.
What it means next
Saturday 10 October brings a derby double, and the table gives both games an edge.
| Match | Venue | Kick-off (SAST) |
|---|---|---|
| Bulls v Lions | Loftus Versfeld, Pretoria | 13:30 |
| Stormers v Sharks | DHL Stadium, Cape Town | 16:00 |
Those times come from the URC’s own listing, converted to SAST, and match the home clubs’ pages. If you saw 12:30 and 15:00 somewhere, ignore them.
The Sharks top the table on 10 points, the Lions are third on nine, and the Bulls and Stormers have six each. A Lions win at Loftus keeps them on the Sharks’ heels and leaves the Bulls with two defeats in a row. A Stormers win in Cape Town drags the leaders back to the pack. A Sharks win, on the other hand, would make them three from three and the team everyone else is chasing.
The selection question hangs over all four teams: who returns, who rests, and who has done enough to keep a jersey.
Here is the thought to take into the week. South African rugby’s home form is not in doubt. What Saturday will tell us is which of these four can win when the crowd is half against them. A derby is the closest thing to an away game you can play at home. By Saturday night, two teams will have proved they can.