Blush, Bulls fans: That was really WP Rugby's THIRD team

These can be giddying, confusing times for your average South African rugby enthusiast, what with three major franchise competitions currently active simultaneously: United Rugby Championship, Heineken Champions (or Challenge) Cup and Currie Cup.

It means that people may be less inclined to stop and meaningfully mull over either the context or magnitude of specific results.

But there is one from the weekend that requires a deeper stint under the microscope … as it highlights the inexplicable nosedive of one major union recently, whereas the other only surges from strength to strength, building a reservoir of depth under head franchise mastermind John Dobson and his allies that had seemed quite unthinkable some 18-24 months ago.

Friday night’s Currie Cup protagonists in Pretoria, the Blue Bulls and Western Province, are two of the modern, widely-recognised “big three” – alongside the Sharks – on the SA first-class front and perhaps also the most time-honoured, intense rivals.

What observers (whether partial to either cause or not) were reasonably entitled to anticipate before kick-off, I believe, was something like a 25-point margin of victory to the Bulls.

Instead, the visitors jubilantly returned to the Cape boasting an eight-point victory (41-33) … and that, even more commendably, from a situation where they’d gone eight points behind themselves, well into the second half.

Frankly this was an outcome, in its perspective, sweeter for the “Streeptruie” than this season’s continued mastery of the Bulls at URC level, where they’d already posted respective wins at Cape Town Stadium (37-27) and Loftus (23-19).

The explanation has everything to do with the extremely conflicting assembly of the respective line-ups for a game in a