If the Brumbies lose, South Africa will host its first Super 12 final
Andy Capostagno
It is not often that South Africans shout for an Australian team, but it will happen on Saturday. A win for the Reds against the Brumbies in Canberra will guarantee for the first time that the final of the Super 12 will be played in South Africa. And there is reason to believe the Reds can do it.
Since losing in the last move of the game against the Stormers in George, the Reds have won their past five matches. It is the kind of late surge that the Crusaders, champions of the past three years, achieved routinely. Every coach in the competition has been at pains to point out that early form counts for nothing. Peaking at the right time is all.
The Reds have got the matchless John Eales back in their starting line-up and the delicious dummy by the Wallaby icon that set up the opening try against the Waratahs last week showed exactly what the people of Brisbane have been missing in his injury-enforced absence.
Eales is at the core of the stronger of the two packs and as usual against the Brumbies the idea is to deny the opposition space and time. The Crusaders proved in last year’s final that it is possible to harass the Brumbies into the same errors that every other rugby team makes under pressure.
But to do so you have to control your set-piece ball, avoid turnovers in the tackle and hope like hell that Stephen Larkham and George Gregan have a bad day at the office. In other words, don’t hold your breath. But within all of that the prospect of some high-quality entertainment remains possible.
Springbok coach Harry Viljoen is one who expects the all-Aussie semifinal to be the better game of the two in aesthetic terms. He said: “I can see as a coach that so much planning has gone in and so many options are available. People look at the way Larkham plays with all his little flip passes, but he can only do that because people are running off him.
“From phase play [Aussie teams have] so many options and are so organised, whereas if you look at the [Cats/Bulls] game the other night, what we tend to do is take the ball up, because there’re no options.”
The truth hurts. Viljoen has put his finger on the biggest single difference between Australian and South African teams. Australian teams attack through their halfbacks, South African teams attack through their forwards.
It will be no different in Durban on Saturday. The Cats will attempt to dominate through their mighty pack and kick their goals via the reliable boot of Louis Koen. The Sharks are not as strong in the scrums, but will poach their fair share of opposition ball in the line-outs and may be a tad quicker to the breakdowns.
It is likely that for both teams the ball will only infrequently go beyond inside centre and that the tactical kicking of the two sets of halfbacks will go some way towards deciding the fate of the match. Fortunately, a full house at Kings Park won’t be disappointed if they don’t get 15-man rugby. A win is all that matters.
The Super 12 began this season with people lamenting the Neanderthal displays South African derbies routinely throw up. Stormers coach Alan Solomons said after last week’s game that he backed the Sharks as the better all-round team and that furthermore he would like to compliment them on the lack of niggle in their Wellington display.
He stopped short of accusing the Cats of mean-spirited play, but the implication was there. It brought the memories of the opening round in Cape Town flooding back. In the wake of that game Japie Mulder was banned for two weeks and the recent displays of his victim, De Wet Barry, show what the Stormers midfield missed in his absence.
Laurie Mains pointed out at the time that there was no more niggle in the game than there would be in a New Zealand or Australian derby. This week we will have the chance of a direct comparison. Expect one thing to become glaringly obvious: South Africans tackle to hurt, not to secure the ball. Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that, but it does tend to contribute towards one-dimensional displays.
Of course, such pessimistic talk could be hopelessly misplaced. The Brumbies-Reds game may turn into a prolonged punch-up and the Cats might play with the flair they showed against the Highlanders, the Sharks with the panache of their home game against the Waratahs. But as Damon Runyon was at pains to point out, that’s not the way to bet.
Bet instead on the Brumbies having too many ways to hurt the Reds, thereby securing a final in Canberra for the second successive year. Bet on a high blood-bin count in Durban and a few players proving a few points to the national coach who chose to ignore them in his first Springbok squad of the season.