Namibia Rugby Year Review – Turbulent year for record-breakers

Namibian rugby endured a turbulent year of both highs and lows during 2018.

The high was undoubtedly the national team’s qualification for their sixth successive Rugby World Cup, while the low was the infighting between the Namibia Rugby Union and Namibia Rugby Limited, which even led to threats of withdrawing from the World Cup.

The local-based Welwitchias started the season with a tough assignment in the South African SuperSport Challenge, and finished bottom of the Northern log after winning just one of eight matches.

They suffered some huge defeats in the process, going down 73-20 to the Blue Bulls, 89-10 to the Lions and 94-3 to the Pumas, but they showed progress with some narrow defeats against the Lions (45-35) and the Blue Bulls (47-31), while they secured a morale-boosting 34-24 victory against the Pumas on 26 May.

Namibia, however, suffered a big setback when their Welsh coach Lyn Jones suddenly announced his resignation via email after he had returned to Wales.

At the time, he said he resigned due to family commitments. But a month later, he emerged as the new national coach of Russia to prepare them for the World Cup.

Under national coach Phil Davies, Namibia’s national team, however, grew from strength to strength during the African Gold Cup competition.

They opened their account with a 55-6 victory against Uganda on 16 June, and a week later rewrote the record books with a 118-0 victory against Tunisia, which beat their previous highest Test victory of 112-0 against Madagascar in 2002.

Namibia’s relentless march to World Cup qualification continued unabated as they beat Zimbabwe 58-28 on 5 August, and two weeks later, they finally secured qualification with a commanding 53-28 victory against Kenya.

It completed a brilliant run during which they amassed a record 347 points for and 69 against at an average of 69-13 per match, while they topped the log on 25 points, with Kenya a distant second on 17 points. Uganda and Tunisia (nine points each), Zimbabwe (8) and Morocco (3) completed the log.

It was a fantastic achievement, but that momentum gained suffered a shuddering halt when a stand-off between NRU president Corrie Mensah and NRL chairman Bradley Basson burst into the open a few weeks later.

One of the contentious issues was the appointment of Johan Diergaardt as Welwitschias coach by the NRU, which was not accepted by the NRL, which insisted that the coach had to come through the High Performance Programme, which was implemented and financially supported by World Rugby.

The infighting escalated, and eventually led to the Welwitschias’ withdrawal from the Currie Cup competition, thereby robbing Namibia’s local-based players of important match practice in the build-up to the World Cup.

The fighting factions were called in by minister of sports Erastus Uutoni, but after a meeting of several hours, the deadlock could not be broken. A group of senior players sided with the NRL, which led to the NRU Council threatening that they would withdraw from the World Cup if the players and ‘third forces’ derailed their campaign.

World Rugby was eventually roped into the negotiations, and at the time of writing was due to issue a statement regarding the way forward for Namibia.

It’s rather unfortunate that after the tremendous achievement of the players, petty infighting of the administrators threatens to derail Namibia’s World Cup campaign, which already showed signs of stagnation towards the end of the year.

A friendly against Kenya was also called off due to administrative issues, while the national Namibia team gave an underwhelming performance on their year-end European tour, losing 47-20 to a Lyn Jones-led Russia and 34-14 to Spain, before beating Portugal 29-23 in their final match.

On the local front, Wanderers finally broke Unam’s dominance to win the Premier League for the first time in eight years.

Unam had won the title for the past three years in a row, but failed to defend their title after going down 32-31 to a spirited United in the semifinals.

In the final, Wanderers dug deep to overturn a 22-17 deficit early in the second half to win the match 30-22 and secure their first Premier League trophy since 2010.

At youth level, Namibia continued to hold their own when they finished fourth at the World Rugby u20 Trophy in Romania in September.

In their group matches, Namibia beat Romania 55-26 and Hong Kong 84-10, but then lost 41-28 to Samoa.

In the third place play-off, Namibia lost 67-36 to Portugal to finish fourth overall out of eight nations.

In local schools rugby, Windhoek Afrikaanse Privaat Skool made history by winning the Momentum u19 Super League title for the first time when they beat Windhoek Gymnasium 26-25 in a thrilling final on 18 August.