Uganda’s Stanbic Black Pirates and Kenya’s Menengai Oilers rugby clubs opened a new chapter in their respective countries’ rugby histories by playing a tour match in the 2025 off-season period.
Pirates are the current Uganda Rugby men’s Premiership champions while Oilers were the Kenya Cup first runners-up. They faced off at Kings Park Bweyogerere on Saturday (October 4) afternoon in a match dubbed ‘The Rift Valley Challenge’.
This was a return to the 2000s-2010s trend of cross-border matches between Ugandan and Kenyan rugby clubs and franchises. Most memorable are the Bamburi Super Series and the East Africa Super Cup.
2025’s Rift Valley Challenge was played over four quarters of thirty minutes each. The technical benches freely rotated and substituted players —36 for the Pirates and 35 for the Oilers —within their large training squads.
In the end, the Oilers outmuscled the Pirates by 45-29 points and were victorious. The contest was characterised by hard collisions, sleek running and some well-worked moves. However, both teams were quite far from their best in terms of physical conditioning.
“An exciting one for us, we are deep into our pre-season preparing for the start of the season, and I could not have asked for a tougher opponent than the Pirates. On our end, I think we saw a few good things and some things that we need to improve and work on. But generally I am very happy with the progress so far,” said Oilers’ head coach Gibson Weru, to the Fat Cats podcast.
“We have not had these tests in quite a while but it’s somewhere to start from, and today was a good test. We have seen the opposition that is across and I think learning from this, we are going to build bigger and better. We hope such games can go on so that rugby across borders can work much better for us; we build both countries in a better way,” said Pirates’ captain Isaac Massanganzira, to the Fat Cats podcast.
Oilers’ season starts in two weeks with the Floodies tournament while Pirates await confirmation of the Uganda Cup dates.
