This weekend the Bulls and Stormers squads will emulate their fans. They will have their feet up while watching, on large format television screens no doubt, the efforts of their Super 12 rivals.
The idea that South African sides get a raw deal having to go on tour for a month has been done to death. The counter-argument is that our teams get their byes at the halfway point in the competition, an ideal arrangement as long as you’ve done well enough in your first five or six matches.
The headmaster’s report this year would read something like this:
Stormers: ‘Capable of excellent work as long as they remember to turn up for the relevant lesson.â€
Bulls: ‘Excellent grasp of the fundamentals, but struggle with the concept of independent thought.â€
Sharks: ‘Happy recipients of an exchange scheme that has all but obliterated the last vestiges of paranoid xenophobia. It will be a pleasure to have them back.â€
Cats: ‘Apparently incapable of absorbing the lessons of their head teacher. So we’ve given them another one.â€
It was a bold move by the South African Rugby Football Union to sack Cats coach Tim Lane in mid-term. The previous regime would have let things go from bad to worse before quietly erasing the coach’s name from the following year’s list. That’s what happened to Frans Ludeke at the Cats, and Phil Pretorius, Heyneke Meyer and a host of others at the Bulls.
After four years of trying, it seems that Lane and South African rugby were simply never meant to be. The likeable Australian was full of hope in the early days of Harry Viljoen’s reign as Springbok coach, but successive defeats at the hands of more skilled and intelligent opponents finally dragged him down.
It is not at all inconceivable that Lane will now take his skills elsewhere and do what Carlos Queiroz has done at Real Madrid.
Queiroz, like Lane, had a fine track record before taking over the coaching of Bafana Bafana, but discovered to his cost what a difficult tightrope uitlanders must tread within major sports in this country.
That it is not impossible has been evinced by the success of Kevin Putt at the Sharks. Those who argue that over a decade in the country has made Putt as near a full-blooded South African as makes no difference should hear him talk and watch him on the training field.
It was an education to see him with his new charges 18 months ago, standing on the B field at Kings Park. In the middle of a perfectly average training session he suddenly blew the whistle, called the players together and said, in a Kiwi accent undimmed by time abroad: ‘Guys! You’re running into the tackle bags!â€
A few players stared fixedly at the ground, unsure of a response. Then Putt explained that the fundamental principle of the game is to run past people, not into them and that tackle bags are there to protect the defender on the training field, not to give the ball carrier a soft landing as he goes to ground in that peculiarly ineffective South African style.
It is no surprise, then, that Putt has found a way to accommodate Brent Russell and Adrian Jacobs in his team, two mavericks who put the fear of God into most of the coaches who have handled them.
He can afford the luxury of playing both in his starting line up thanks to the renaissance undergone at flyhalf and inside centre by Butch James and Trevor Halstead.
In a very different playing pattern the same pair excelled during the Sharks’ journey to the final three seasons ago. Back then Halstead was simply used as a battering ram to set up second-phase ball for the forwards to play off, while James’s stiff-arm tackles were forgiven as long as he promised never, ever to play like Louis Koen or Braam van Straaten, the incumbent Springbok flyhalves at the time.
Much water has passed under the bridge since then and while James is still fond of the odd stiff-arm he is playing the best rugby of his career. Which raises a question about Putt’s preseason decision to sign Scottish flyhalf Gregor Townsend. Did he really intend to play Townsend ahead of James, or did he want a stick to beat James with, metaphorically speaking?
Whatever the case, James has clicked into gear, Townsend is warming the bench and the Sharks are about to embark on a six-match home series with the best chance of any of our teams to make it to the semifinals.
Indeed, if they were to win four out of six — a not unreasonable ask — a home semi is a distinct possibility. But there we go again with the South African urge to assume future success based upon the evidence of last week.
Just as the Bulls came unstuck against the Stormers, the Cats have every chance of upsetting Putt’s applecart in Durban this week. But don’t bet on it.