Bulls coach Rudy Joubert has a problem: his team keeps losing close matches. In six Super 12 games this season the Bulls have won two and lost four, but the only team who actually subdued them and took them to the cleaners was the Brumbies. And in Canberra the Brumbies can do that to anyone.
All of which will be of little consolation to Joubert, six weeks on from the day when his team beat the Hurricanes in Napier and did what no Bulls team had done since 1996, namely won their opening two matches.
By winning their first game on tour in the Antipodes the Bulls earned a licence to dream and they came close enough in two of their remaining matches to keep the flickering embers going. At Loftus this Saturday they will have to fan those embers into a roaring flame if they are to keep fading hopes of a semi-final spot alive. Furthermore, they’ll have to do it against the tournament leaders, the Blues.
The Aucklanders tarnished their reputation with a one-dimensional defeat against the Highlanders in Dunedin last week, but as South African sides have proved often enough, you can throw the form book away when traditional rivals play each other.
And tradition is what it is all about. Many millions of dollars have been spent trying to persuade the public that the Super 12 was created out of nothing, but if you’d suggested that to the full house at Loftus last weekend you’d have got a face full of boerewors roll for your pains.
Dress it up anyway you like in whatever politically correct threads, but this was Northern Transvaal against Western Province, the greatest rivalry in South African rugby. You don’t have to sell something as primal as that, as evidenced by the panicky press release that came out of Loftus on Thursday, apologising for the fact that the usual 2 000 scholars tickets would not be available owing to the fact that the stadium was expected to be sold out.
Something similar would have happened in Dunedin ahead of the Blues visit. Auckland against Otago, North Island against South Island, metropolis against studentville, them against us. About the only thing missing from the mix at either Loftus or Carisbrook was religion, at least of the spiritual kind.
So amid all the bad news and the painful fact that on the home stretch all four South African teams are in the bottom half of the table, let’s hold on to the soothing fact that domestic squabbles can still fill stadiums. Television rights may be the holy grail of sports unions these days, but take away the crowd and you haven’t got a product worth televising.
Despite defeat there is likely to be another huge crowd at Loftus this Saturday and the statistically minded among them will expect a win, for it is a surprising fact that the Blues have never beaten the Bulls in this country.
The closest they came was a remarkable 40-40 draw in 1997. In 1999 and 2001 the Bulls managed a total of three wins in the Super 12. Two of those were against the Blues. That’s about as close to a hoodoo as most superstitious sports people would care to come.
The Bulls did enough in defeat against the Stormers to suggest that they are not far away from being a really good team. Captaincy has been good for Victor Matfield and his partnership with the bearded young behemoth, Geo Cronje, has a Springbok look about it. With those two in the engine room the Bulls pack dominated the Stormers and only remarkable defence in the final quarter gave the away side victory.
That defence came at a cost. The flying winger Egon Seconds is doubtful for the Stormers match against the Reds this weekend, while hooker Pieter Dixon is out for the tournament with a broken jaw. The good news for Gert Smal is that his decision to rest Corné Krige has been vindicated and his captain will return refreshed this week.
The vagaries of injury notwithstanding, two successive wins have set up the Stormers for a fascinating run in, and they play all five of their remaining matches at Newlands. After the Reds come the Blues, the Chiefs, the Crusaders and the Cats. The old platitude that there is no such thing as an easy game in the Super 12 applies, but an unbeaten run is not impossible and neither is a home semifinal.
It may even be seen as a pivotal season for the Newlands faithful, for the heroics of the past fortnight have been achieved without Pieter Rossouw, Breyton Paulse and Percy Montgomery, not to mention Bob Skinstad. The whole point about tradition is that it is bigger than individuals and the good news for South African rugby is that the public still cares, whether or not the Stormers and Bulls win this weekend.