October at Ellis Park

Ask most supporters when the 2025/26 season turned and they will say Round 12, because that is when the trophy was won. The trophy is not the turning point. The trophy is the consequence.

The turn happened in October, when a side that had lost three in a row in Europe came home and beat the Scarlets 29-18 on 18 October. On its own it is an unremarkable result — a mid-table opponent, a home win, a margin of eleven. In the shape of the season it is the hinge.

Consider what it prevented. Four previous URC campaigns had followed a recognisable pattern: a difficult tour, a stuttering return, a mid-season recovery that arrived too late, and a finish outside the play-offs. Twelfth, ninth, ninth, eleventh. The Lions had been a competent URC side that never quite turned competence into a season.

The October win did not fix that by itself. What it did was stop the September tour from becoming the story. From that point the home record ran to the log position climbed steadily rather than in the frantic late surge that had characterised previous years, and by the time the derbies arrived in the new year the Lions were competing for a trophy instead of chasing a top-eight place.

There is a second candidate and it deserves a mention: the 34-22 win over the Sharks on 21 February, a bonus-point derby victory in a rescheduled fixture that kept the Shield alive going into the final derby weekend. Lose that and Round 12 is meaningless. It is the match that made the Shield-sealing win possible.

But the turn was October. A side that had every reason to spend the season explaining itself decided instead to make Ellis Park the hardest place to visit in the competition, and everything the club achieved in 2025/26 grew out of that decision.