There’s an old nursery rhyme that goes like this: ”No one loves me, everybody hates me, think I’ll go and eat worms. Cut their heads off, suck their innards out, throw their skins away. If you ever get the feeling that nobody loves you eat two fat worms a day.”
Heyneke Meyer could be forgiven for introducing that mantra to his Bulls training camp in Christchurch this week. The Bulls have reached the semifinals of the Super 14 for the second successive season. They have been demonstrably the best team in South Africa in all competitions for about three years, and yet beyond their immediate blue-clad family of support, no one loves them. Why?
Partly it has to do with method. Meyer has worked out that size matters and has built a gargantuan pack. Everything the team does is based upon forward ascendancy and because of that there are times when the Bulls can look like schoolyard bullies. No one loves a schoolyard bully.
And yet there is a significant rugby brain beneath the fearsome aspect of the blue behemoth. In the front row it has Gary Botha, in the second Victor Matfield, and at the back, Pedrie Wannenberg. These are rugby players who do not fit the mould of either Bulls or South African forwards. Each can pass off either hand and step past potential tacklers.
Traditionally, this country’s coaching systems do not support such players. Avoiding contact by either passing to a better-placed colleague or sidestepping is regarded as an abnegation of responsibility. Worse than that, it proves you’re a fairy.
That’s why Matfield took so long to establish himself at Test level, whereas if he’d been born in Australia he would have been hailed as the new John Eales at the age of 19.
So the Bulls pack is a significant mixture of brains and brawn, but something else is missing. In a word, motivation. People outside Pretoria don’t like this Bulls team because the wrong things motivate it. It likes to humiliate South African opposition and it is not picky about its methods of doing so.
Against the Sharks in Pretoria, a match that at the time appeared to be an eliminator for the semifinals, the Bulls targeted two key players. The Sharks’ Kiwi flyhalf, Tony Brown, broke both hands trying to defend himself, and tighthead prop BJ Botha still wears the ugly weal under his right eye sustained by a punch in the opening seconds of the game.
The tactic worked and the shell-shocked Sharks were beaten in the first half hour. When they recovered their equilibrium they challenged the Bulls, but by then it was too late.
Last week in Cape Town the Bulls had been written off. The Sharks’ victory over the Force on Friday night meant the Bulls needed to win by 32 points or more against the Stormers. Meyer carried press clippings into the dressing room and told his men that no one believed it was possible for the Bulls to leapfrog the Sharks. So they duly went out and did it.
Much has been made of the Sharks’ lassitude in the final quarter that allowed the Force to score two tries, thereby reducing the magnitude of the Bulls’ task. But the fact is that the Bulls needed to win by 32 or more and they did. If the figure had been 42 they would have done that too, and probably 52 as well. They were motivated, you see.
After the game Meyer said: ”It wasn’t just us against the Stormers on Saturday, but us against the rest of the world — I told my players that if they remember from where they got their strength, nothing is impossible.” Which brings us to the root of the problem: these guys are insecure.
The Bulls rely for motivation on the fact that nobody in South Africa likes them. Which explains why, when they travel to the Antipodes, they tend to perform so poorly. No one in Australia or New Zealand cares enough to hate them. To them, they are just another South African rugby team, albeit one that conforms more than most to their racist stereotypes.
So, motivationally speaking, Meyer has his hands full this week. He needs to convince his team that spanking the Stormers at Newlands and thereby eliminating the Sharks was not an end in itself, but a means to an end. In his favour is the fact that no one believes the Bulls can beat the Crusaders in Christchurch. After all, with Daniel Carter to the fore, the same side horribly exposed the Bulls just two weeks ago at Loftus.
But the Crusaders are not going to be caught off guard: they have been here many times before and know how to win the important games. They have great players in all the important positions, home advantage, and face a side that has flown across a plethora of time zones just to make up the numbers.
Under the circumstances, Meyer is probably right to remind his players ”from where they got their strength”. It’s either that or eating worms.