For the past few years Natal’s Sharks have been the dominant South African Super 12 team, but this season it is the Stormers who are showing the form to reach the final stages, writes Andy Capostagno
If you listen you can hear it, the shuffling of booted feet. And if you happen to see out of the corner of your eye a bearskin hat, no further confirmation will be required. No doubt about it, it’s the changing of the guard in the Super 12.
Since 1996 a competition which has lived by the watchword of unpredictability has had two bankers; Auckland (Blues) and Natal (Sharks) have reached the semi-final stages every year, contesting the final in 1996 and the semi-final in 1997. This year both units have shown signs of mortality.
The Sharks started slowly and put together a performance of such pedigree in beating the Cats at Ellis Park that all doubters seemed to have been confined to padded cells. But the reasons for that performance lay in the outstanding contributions from their senior Springboks, Andre Joubert, Henry Honiball and Gary Teichmann.
Subsequently they saw off the Otago Highlanders in style at King’s Park, but in later matches the big three have not been as dominant and as a result the team has entered a lean spell, losing to the Wellington Hurricanes in East London and the Stormers at Newlands.
For the Blues it has been a long season of discontent. Which is not to say that the team has not been winning. They are in fact unbeaten since losing to the Canterbury Crusaders in the second week of the tournament, but it has been the manner of victory (and particularly of the 12-12 draw with Queensland in Albany) which has concerned their army of supporters.
Remember the team which thrashed the Stormers 74-28 less than a year ago? It is no more. Key players have gone, either into retirement, to other Super 12 outfits or abroad. Fortress Eden Park was not breached in three years until the Crusaders won the final against all odds there last year and Todd Blackadder’s side proved it was no fluke by doing it again this year.
And now, with injuries mounting for the Kiwis, the Cats suddenly have a real chance to emulate the Crusaders this week as they begin their antipodean travels. The best pack in the competition is up against a new-look Blues eight, with injury likely to rule out the mighty loose-head prop, Craig Dowd, and Olo Brown’s replacement at tight- head, Paul Thomson.
Look throughout the Blues team and you’ll see unfamiliar names; Keith Lowen in the centre, Steve Devine at scrum-half, Tony Coghlan in the front row. Given the Kiwi propensity for finding superstars on a regular basis, don’t be surprised if all three end up in John Hart’s World Cup squad, but the point is that right now Auckland are vulnerable because they don’t know each other very well.
However, recognising that vulnerability is one thing; finding a way to exploit it is another matter. Andre Markgraaff knows that the early losses suffered by the Cats are an Achilles heel as far as reaching the semi- finals is concerned. They have played themselves into form, but in front of 40 000 screaming Aucklanders form may become an irrelevance; passion will win the day and that is a commodity which does not come on to the field with the Energade bottles.
It is a commodity which Alan Solomons seems to have instilled into his Stormers side following their own antipodean tour, which seemed to have raised more questions than answers. With a five-week run-in of home games and a position in the top three of the log you could be forgiven for thinking that the Stormers have secured a semi- final berth.
But that would be to ignore the nature of this strength-against-strength competition, the very thing which Solomons tried to undermine with his team selection for last month’s drubbing by the Highlanders.
Still to come are the Crusaders, the Blues, the Chiefs and the Cats. It would be a brave man who picked 16 points for the Stormers out of that line-up. But all Solomons can do, in the parlance of professional sport the world over, is to take them one game at a time.
First up the Crusaders, the defending champions whose halo has slipped a little this season. It was interesting to discover that in New Zealand the Crusaders were considered fortunate to have won last year and that they were regarded as considerably weaker than both the Highlanders and the Blues.
It may be a little provincialism creeping in, for those with only short-term memories should recall that Andrew Mehrtens lit up the tournament with his fly-half play, the centres played out of their skins and the pack, led magnificently by Blackadder, took a backward step for no one.
The Crusaders are capable of winning at Newlands because they were, and are, a good side. However, the Stormers are currently living up to their name thanks to a tight five which is developing nicely, a centre partnership that may well be the best in the land and, above all, because the return to fitness of Corn Krige has taken the pressure off Bobby Skinstad.
With his fetcher in the vanguard, Skinstad can indulge his penchant for prestidigitation to his heart’s and the crowd’s content. If Krige stays fit he may yet play the role for South Africa which Nick Mallett wanted two years ago, before injury and Rassie Erasmus gave us all a mild form of amnesia.