Remember the good old days when South African teams were winning Super 14 games all over the southern hemisphere? The rare days, the fair days, when Australian teams were taking regular hidings and 22 of the best players in New Zealand were only allowed to release their testosterone reserves in the gym. Well, that was then, this is now.
Week nine of the Super 14 proved a bridge too far for our franchises, four of which lost. It has been unkindly suggested that the reason all five didn’t lose was that the Stormers had a bye.
The other team without a game was the Reds, which meant that the same joke would have applied in Australia, were it not for the fact that the Force beat the Sharks in Perth and the Brumbies did likewise against the Lions at Ellis Park.
Was it mere coincidence that Springbok coach Jake White chose this week to come out of hibernation and say, ”we must be realistic and not jump the gun. It’s not just a case of arriving in France and winning the World Cup”?
Traditionally, of course, the last five weeks of log play in the Super 14 has been a time for hand wringing and wondering where on earth White is going to find 15 players worthy of representing South Africa.
We are accustomed to having one side hanging in by its fingernails with an outside chance of making the semifinals, the rest having long since surrendered all hope of making the knockout stages. Yet here we are, still contemplating at least two and possibly three of our sides finishing in the top four.
That despite the fact of those four losses and despite the reversal of fortunes in the Antipodes. Time for a cold shower in the bathroom of oblivion and the realisation that one defeat does not make a season any more than (in the case of the Sharks) six successive wins does.
South African teams have done an awful lot right this year, so now is not the time for gloom and despondency. Now is the time to plot a path through to the semifinals using pragmatism rather than false bravado.
For the Sharks, it is fairly simple. This week, they must win against the Reds at Ballymore. Under Eddie Jones, the former powerhouse of Australian rugby has a demolition order standing over it.
Sharks skills coach David Campese, the greatest Wallaby of them all, is not on tour with the team and found time last week to express his grave concerns about the direction in which Australian rugby is heading, even while the Force were beating the Sharks.
He said: ”I’ve been telling the ARU (Australian Rugby Union) for years that it’s utter madness to even contemplate a fourth franchise. We simply don’t have the player base to justify it. All that’s happened is that the Force have lured some good players away from the other three teams and now they’re strong and the others are weak.”
Campese, for one, is not expecting the Reds to regain their footing against the Sharks. Right now, Dick Muir’s squad may be going through a crisis of confidence, but they remain a good side. They have, moreover, a game in hand on all three of the sides immediately below them on the log.
Win against the Reds and the following week’s encounter with the Blues in Auckland represents an eight-point swing, with the Kiwi unit currently top of the log and the Sharks fourth. The Sharks finish against the Chiefs (away), the Lions (home) and the Stormers (away). None of these games should be considered onerous for a team with genuine title ambitions.
The Bulls lie in sixth position on the log, but their three wins on the road together with their run-in means that they are now at shorter odds than the Sharks to clinch a home semi-final. After this week’s bye, they play the Stormers, Blues and Reds at Loftus and the Lions across the Jukskei in Johannesburg.
The third local side with lingering hopes of a top-four finish is the Lions. In an unprecedented fixture fuddle, the Lions play all four of the other South African teams in the last month of log play, two at home and two away. Posterity will decide on whether this was a good or bad season for our teams based squarely on the results of those last four Lions fixtures, it seems.
Eleven previous seasons of Super Rugby have taught us to expect the worst. The wrong teams will win and lose and, as usual, we will have to be content with one team, probably the one that finishes fourth in the log, to represent South Africa in the semi-finals. This year, it’s going to be different. Trust me.