There is a Sanzar (the alliance between the Rugby Unions of South Africa, New Zealand and Australia) meeting currently under way where the delegates have been given a licence to dream. Some of the ideas up for debate include moving the Super 12 to a different slot, expanding it to 14 or 15 teams, playing all the games in one country on a three yearly rotational basis, embracing the idea of a global season, playing a nine nations knockout tournament between World Cups, and generally taking the game to the unitiated.
No doubt a few even more radical ideas will emerge at the meeting, but let’s be clear on one thing at least: there’s nothing too much wrong with a sport that can produce a spectacle as good as the Bulls against the Brumbies at Loftus last week.
There are those who would argue that the teeming rain reduced the match to a lottery and that far more people want to watch the kind of rugby the Brumbies can produce on a dry field than the Bulls can on a wet one. Those people can go and jump in any one of the lakes surrounding the main field at Loftus.
Last Saturday the steamroller outperformed the Ferrari, the tortoise beat the hare and the sledgehammer cracked the nut. If the Bulls fluffed their lines in similar — though less intense — conditions against the Highlanders a week previously, then their entire pack recited Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy without missing a beat against the Brumbies.
This was indeed classical theatre at its best, for when William Webb-Ellis first picked up the ball and ran with it all those years ago he surely never envisaged a time when flyhalves would kick 80m touchfinders or drop goals from inside their own half, both of which occurrences have become relatively routine at Loftus.
Which is not to say that the game was emasculated in any way: far from it. After all, the rain may have fallen in biblical proportions, but the Bulls still scored four tries and earned a bonus point. To put their performance into perspective consider the following.
Across the Jukskei in Johannesburg on the same day and in the same conditions, Rand Afrikaans University (RAU) met the University of Pretoria (Tuk-kies) at RAU Stadium. The Tuk-kies team was essentially the Blue Bulls second team, RAU were similarly endowed with alumni from the Golden Lions.
These were not mugs, but they produced comfortably the worst game of rugby I’ve seen in 11 years of living in this country. It went scrum, lineout, scrum, lineout, scrum, lineout for 80 minutes until RAU finally won 10-9 by dint of the only (highly
fortunate) try of the match.
Anyone with the misfortune to watch the contest would have concluded two things: you can’t play rugby in the mud and the game is in dire straits in South Africa. The Bulls gave the lie to both of those misconceptions and simultaneously gave our rugby public the same licence to dream as the administrators at the Sanzar meeting.
It was, of course, only one of three wins for South African teams in the fourth round, and the middle one at that. The Sharks won in Dunedin with the last move of the match and the Stormers won at Newlands, despite an attack of nerves midway through the second half.
Which brings us to the $64 000 question: Are we good or is everyone else bad? Given that there are no unbeaten teams after less than a month’s play and given that those perennial champions, the Blues and the Crusaders, are only kept off the bottom of the log by the pitiful Cats, it’s beginning to look a lot like the latter.
Inevitably in the fallout of England winning the World Cup, the Sanzar nations are in a rebuilding phase. Talented youngsters are being given a chance somewhat earlier than they would have had the next World Cup been one year away instead of four. Greater premium is being extended to youth than to experience.
The Bulls are in the happy position of being further down the rebuilding path than most, with two successful domestic seasons behind them, during which they won the Currie Cup twice and finished sixth in last year’s Super 12. It was on that basis that they were installed as the most likely South African team to contend this year, hence the long faces after the opening defeat by the Sharks.
They did not suddenly become a bad team, however, and are packed with players who, injuries and chequebook raids notwithstanding, will still be around after the 2011 World Cup.
And if the likes of Jacques Cronje, Pedrie Wannenburg, Gary Botha, Fourie du Preez and Derick Hougaard make as large an impact on the international stage between now and then as their talent deserves, they may well look back en masse in 10 years time and point to a rain-soaked day at Loftus in 2004 as the moment it all started to come together.