Given the somewhat depressing start to the season, the Easter weekend seems a good time to be pondering whether South African rugby can rise again. In week four of the Super 12, the Stormers played poorly and lost, the Cats played well and lost, the Bulls played out of their skins and won, while the less said about the Sharks the better.
This week, the long Antipodean sojourn of the Bulls and Stormers comes to an end with fixtures against the Waratahs in Sydney for the latter, and the Hurricanes in Palmerston North for the former. Notwithstanding last week’s exceptional performance by the Bulls, both sides would go a long way towards redeeming their reputations with a win.
The Stormers won their opening game of the season against the Sharks, which allowed them to be more upbeat about a draw with the Highlanders in week two than their performance that day justified. A narrow defeat by the Brumbies in Canberra maintained the illusion of a Rolls Royce about to judder into life, but it was a battered Toyota Corolla that left the field in Sydney last week.
Familiar problems have beset the Stormers. Their lineout against the Waratahs was poor, but no more so than it was for much of last season, due in part to the scattergun feeding of hookers Pieter Dixon, Tjoepie van den Heever and Dawid Britz.
But at least last year coach Gert Smal could rely on the athletic presence of Selborne Boome. This year Britz is unavailable while he contests a drug ban, while Boome and Van den Heever are campaigning in Europe. Gerrie Britz was signed as a straight swap for Boome, but as ever the problem lies with the alternatives.
Quinton Davids has been on the scene long enough now for us to know what he brings to the game: he is a nice focal point for a forward drive and tidy in the scrum, but his lineout skills are almost non-existent. Joe van Niekerk won a stack of ball at the tail of the line in years gone by, but he is currently a pale shadow of that dynamic young presence.
Which raises the issue of form and quality. A host of Tri-Nations-winning Springboks are currently playing on reputation and not much else. De Wet Barry and Marius Joubert are a case in point at the Stormers, and then there’s Bakkies Botha at the Bulls. The upside of this is that our players are not peaking too early; the downside may be that they don’t peak at all.
At least Heyneke Meyer’s long wait for a win in the Super 12 is over. In the aftermath of the win over the Hurricanes, Meyer was less than sanguine about critics who wrote his team off, but there was little else that could have been said with the evidence at hand.
The Bulls were simply awful against a very ordinary Highlanders outfit a week earlier, playing the kind of ”bash it up” rugby that gives South Africans a bad name. Against a Hurricanes team that had won three games on the road, they ought to have had no chance.
The problem that faces Meyer now is how to do it all again a week later. Win against the Warriors and his team will have earned nine or 10 out of a possible 20 points down under. With five games at Loftus to come and one in Durban, that would install them as genuine title contenders.
Defeat, on the other hand, would all but consign them to also-ran status.