Andy Capostagno Rugby
We should be used to it by now, but it doesn’t make it any easier: how is it possible to pick a winner in a competition where the best players are only sporadically available?
The Lions won the Vodacom Cup because, what with bottomless bank accounts and one thing and another, they had the greatest strength in depth. But does that mean they will win the Bankfin Currie Cup as well?
Nick Mallett is well within his rights to recuse his Springbok squad from the best provincial competition in world rugby. This is, after all, a World Cup year and Italy arrive for a two Test tour this week. But Mallett’s decision means, perforce, that anyone not currently in the national squad will have to play out of his socks on a weekly basis just to get given a serious look.
And much as the marketers will scream through the one-eyed God, television, that future Springboks will be seen on the screen every day, the provincial coaches would far rather have their established stars than those with half-a-dozen rough edges yet to be burnished.
I happened to bump into Ian McIntosh last week at the preparations for the centenary of College Rovers in Durban.
He said: “It’s helluva frustrating. You build a team in the Super 12 and then it gets taken away from you when the Currie Cup starts. I’m not saying we would have won it, but I guarantee we [Natal] would have been in the Currie Cup final the last two years if it hadn’t have been for international calls.”
Which should just about sum up the thoughts of Laurie Mains at the Lions and Alan Solomons at Western Province as they look ahead to this year’s competition.
For Mac, of course, this is the last time he will have to go to the well. One of the most respected coaches in the game will retire at the end of the season with a few regrets, but a solid core of high-level achievement. He took his team to the first Currie Cup in their history, reached the Super 12 final with the Sharks and, lest we forget, coached the Springboks for far too short a time.
It is intriguing then, that the first match of this year’s competition should pit Mac against Phil Pretorius, coach of the MTN Falcons. It is the old master against the young pretender under the lights at King’s Park on Friday night.
Pretorius is a Springbok coach in the making. He got his big break with the South-Western Districts Eagles and two seasons ago moved up to Brakpan. Last year his Falcons team got within a whisker of the semi-finals, by winning and scoring four tries against another former minnow, Griquas, in the final match of the log section. Other results went against them, but Pretorius’s men had proved themselves in exalted company.
This year it will be a lot tougher. Braam van Straaten, the catalyst for so many of the good things last season, has moved to Cape Town and his replacement, Christo Potgieter, is not in the same class.
But the pack remains in place and will give as good as it gets wherever it goes and Pretorius’s other job – coach of Tonga – will bring with it an injection of South Sea island flair, assuming the South African Rugby Football Union allows the islanders to play in the Currie Cup.
We will know much more about the standard of the teams in this year’s competition after Friday night. Remember that this time last year people were saying that the low- level intensity of the Vodacom Cup was detrimental to the game. The Currie Cup which followed was one of the best for many years and there is no reason why those standards should not be maintained in 1999.
But working out which teams will prosper in such conditions is not an easy task. Given the preponderance of Western Province players in the Stormers side, you could be forgiven for assuming that the finalists of last year and champions of 1997 were a shoo-in again this time round.
But events on the morning of the Super 12 semi-final, together with Mallett’s Springbok selection, will count heavily against the streeptuie.
The Lions too, immensely strong on paper thanks to a close season influx of Free Staters, will have to achieve through promising youngsters and grizzled veterans. The Bulls are champions and therefore cannot be ignored, but countless lacklustre displays in the Vodacom Cup suggest that they are not capable of a repeat.
Finally, given the number of quality players to have come out of Kimberley and Bloemfontein in recent years it is hard to ignore the challenge of Free State and Griquas, both of whom have won the Cup but once in their illustrious histories.
It would serve as a handy wake-up call to the traditional powers if the Cup were to return to the centre of the country in a World Cup and, rather more importantly, an election year.
ENDS