The final straw has been clutched; the camel’s back has been broken. The penultimate round of log action in the Super 12 is upon us and finally we can say without fear of reprisal that no South African team will contest a semifinal spot this year.
The good news is that, with the Cats entertaining the Stormers at Ellis Park and the Sharks travelling to Pretoria to play the Bulls, for the second time this year (and the possibility of two draws notwithstanding) we are guaranteed a South African win or two. Springbok coach Rudolf Straeuli will be able to watch both games without breaking the speed limit on the Ben Schoeman highway, since the Cats game kicks off at 2pm, the Bulls at 7:05pm.
Given all that has happened this year it is no bad thing that the final two rounds will be devoted to domestic scrapping. Indeed, Straeuli now has a month to play with his notions of what constitutes the best 22 players in the land ahead of the first Test against Wales at the beginning of June. So what may he learn this week?
In Pretoria he will see the most porous defence in the history of the Super 12. It may seem as though Heyneke Meyer’s troops give away 50 points every week, but statistics prove this is not the case. In fact they have conceded 437 points in nine games, an average per outing of just 48,55.
They have in the process scored an average of 21,66 points per match and in the blissful days before the introduction of the five-point try that would have ensured victory seven times out of nine. But that was then and this is now and the question that Meyer and his men need to answer is, how come the same defensive frailties that were apparent in round one are still there two months later?
As for the Bulls’ opponents, under Kevin Putt the Sharks have played a more expansive game than Straeuli allowed, but they are still losing games they should win, last week’s 29-30 defeat by the Reds being a classic example. Much of it is down to underlying feelings of inadequacy.
But if the Sharks were profligate in allowing the Reds to win, they were positively parsimonious in comparison to the Cats. Against the Crusaders the Cats were 24-0 up in 24 minutes and playing coruscating rugby. Twinkle-toed flyhalf Andre Pretorius had scored a try that Phil Bennett would have been proud of and the champions elect were simply not in it. So what went wrong?
The kind of self-belief engendered by winning regularly had something to do with it. It would be tempting to say that the Crusaders threw caution to the wind at 27-3 down after half an hour, but that would simply be untrue, for instead of playing like millionaires with nothing to lose, they played like 15 Ebenezer Scrooges, keeping the ball under wraps for minutes on end and frustrating their opponents into errors. In this manner they scored two tries before half time and won the second half 20-3.
And before anyone says that South African teams are incapable of such turnarounds, remember how the Springboks came back from the dead to beat the All Blacks 24-23 in Durban in 1998? It was during Nick Mallett’s team’s 17-match run of victories and they did it because they had forgotten how to lose.
One of Straeuli’s aims this year must be to restore some measure of psychological ascendancy to Springbok rugby. All four of our Super 12 franchises have lost games they should have won because they had intimations of mortality, and that applies as much to the Stormers as it does to the Bulls.
It was readily apparent at the time and crystal clear now that the Stormers shot themselves in the foot early on through single-point defeats at Newlands against the Waratahs and the Highlanders. With eight points from those two games the Stormers would have been sitting on 26 points this weekend and well in the running for a semifinal berth.