The Bulls have lost their first three choices as captain to injury, namely Victor Matfield, Fourie du Preez and Gary Botha. A fourth option, Anton Leonard, has retired to tend a coffee shop in George. The Sharks are still waiting for their All Black flyhalf, Tony Brown, to return from Japan and will not have the Springbok captain John Smit available until halfway through the tournament.
This week the Sharks’ marketing department received a severe blow to the solar plexus when the South African Football Association decided that it would not be using King’s Park for the 2010 soccer World Cup after all.
Before January was out, the Stormers had lost more props than a collapsed mine shaft and were still wondering how on earth they managed to allow their gifted fullback Earl Rose to sign for the Cats. Meanwhile, the Johannesburg-based franchise has problems of its own with Springbok fullback Conrad Jantjes potentially out of the game for six months.
So the Super 14 begins this weekend with a little more of a whimper than a bang and none of the South African franchises has yet signed the participation agreement for the competition. Crisis? What crisis? This is merely business as usual for the game of rugby union in this country.
The biggest headache that the various coaches have to deal with is the spectre of underachievement.
No one, bar the Bulls, is talking about the semifinals and everyone fears relegation. There has even been speculation about who gets relegated in the event of two South African sides finishing on the same number of points.
Apparently, it goes first to points difference and, if that can’t separate them, who beat who in log play. It may seem defeatist talk, but given our teams’ record in a decade of Super 12 play, it is surely realistic. As Oscar Wilde might have put it: We are all of us in the gutter, but not enough of us are looking at the stars.
As usual, the tournament begins with domestic squabbles. The newly enfranchised Cheetahs host the Bulls in Bloemfontein and the Stormers travel to Ellis Park to play the Cats. Only the Sharks have foreign opposition in the form of the Chiefs, traditionally the weakest of the New Zealand teams, but strengthened this year by a handful of quality All Blacks.
It was a truism in the Super 12, and even more so in the Super 14, that teams must win their home games. The trauma of travel having been exponentially increased with two additional teams, every South African franchise needs to emulate the Bulls. The Pretorian guard may travel worse than Gulliver, but when they are at home and living on boerekos they defend Loftus Versfeld astonishingly well.
It is, more than anything, about a culture of winning and that’s a hard thing to emulate when, like the Cats, you have a culture of losing. In a host of close matches in the last five years of the Super 12, the Cats always seemed to implode with the finish line in sight. They expected to lose and they did.
The Stormers, on the other hand, were generally the best South African side on view and now that hard times have come to Newlands coach Kobus van der Merwe has to find a way to arrest the precipitous slide. Like Dick Muir at the Sharks, Van der Merwe knows he has backs who can dazzle, but lacks forward power.
Which leaves us with the Cheetahs, the only side without a recent record of Super 12 failure. That plain fact may be the best tool in coach Rassie Erasmus‚ box of tricks. It’s not much, but it’s a start. Or if you want to put it another way: The journey of a thousand miles begins with a loose fan belt and a leaky radiator.