Benetton’s South African scrumhalf Dewaldt Duvenage says there is a special rugby festival atmosphere in Treviso that will be an additional spur for his team when they host the Bulls in Saturday evening’s PRO14 Rainbow Cup final.
Duvenage, who played for the Stormers for several years before leaving for Italy in 2017 and also represented South Africa at under-20 level, has noted that Benetton has been written off in his homeland. But he warns that the Treviso team should not be equated with the struggling Italy national team as they have several foreigners in the group, while the home players have been energised around the buzz generated by their rare appearance in a final.
“We managed to make the PRO14 quarterfinal a couple of years ago and that was a huge thing, but we are an old club and this is our first final so this is an even bigger thing,” said Duvenage from Treviso.
“Having made the quarterfinal and lost we now want to take the next step by not only playing in a final but winning it. There is plenty of motivation and it is being helped by the atmosphere that is enveloping this game. We will have fans back, 1500 of them, for the first time since the start of the pandemic when we play the final, and we are really looking forward to that.
“It makes a big difference to a player when he puts in a big tackle on an opponent and it is accompanied by a roar of approval from your supporters. But it is not just the game itself where there will be a buzz, this whole week there has been a rugby festival kind of atmosphere in the town. For instance, on Wednesday there was a big event in the plaza in the middle of the town where both teams were introduced to the public.”
Duvenage has obviously been reading the South African media on the internet as he knows that his side has been largely written off in this country ahead of the final. The Bulls will go in as overwhelming favourites and he accepts that. However, the 33-year-old warns against reading too much into the poor form that Benetton displayed in the PRO14 season that has driven their underdog status.
Treviso played 16 games in the PRO14, losing 15 and drawing one and like their fellow Italian team, Zebre, they finished bottom of their section.
“I don’t want to make excuses but the pandemic was a huge factor for us because we had 14 guys in the Italian national squad,” said Duvenage.
“The national squad was in a bubble for a long time so it meant that we didn’t have the services of those 14 players for pretty much the whole season. That had a huge impact on us. And we were also without our defence coach, South African Marius Goosen, as he was also with the Italian team. So we played the entire PRO14 season without a defence coach.
“But that whole experience saw the group grow a lot tighter. Young guys started to come through in the absence of the older guys and some of them developed really well. If you look at our results you think that is bad, but a lot of our games were really close losses. Towards the end of our PRO14 campaign, we started to dominate stats like territory. We’d still lose, and we’d often lose in the last minute, but in terms of performance it did feel that even though we were losing, we were on an upward curve.”
The upward curve grew proper legs once the Italian national players returned and the squad was able to train properly as they had enough players to train properly, but Duvenage reckons there was something else that propelled the rejuvenation that was seen in first the Challenge Cup and then the Rainbow Cup.
“This might sound odd but I think a big turning point might have been a barbeque (braai) we had as a team at the end of the PRO14 season. Our coach, Kieran Crowley, through all the books and manuals we’d been working off during the campaign into the fire and said ‘Right, that is done, now we start afresh.
“Our form started improving in the Challenge Cup, but the big result for us was the first Rainbow Cup game against Glasgow Warriors. The Warriors were at full strength but we really hammered them in that game. I can’t remember the score but we got nearly 50 and their only points came in the last five minutes when they scored a few tries when we had brought on the replacements and the game was already comfortably won with a bonus point.
“For the guys who had really bonded through the tough times, the confidence that came with that win was a massive boost. After that it just felt like a lot had changed and that we were on a different path. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but it feels like we’ve been on the up. We didn’t really play that well in our two games against Zebre, which were typical derbies, but we saw it as a good sign that we won while not playing our best, and it was the same in our win against Connacht.
“I know we may have got a bit of luck in not having to travel for our last game because of the pandemic, with Ospreys forfeiting the match points to us, but it has just felt like the stars are aligned and the guys are determined to make the most of this opportunity. To have a home final is amazing. Normally it is neutral venues for a final in PRO14.”