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Comment: Rob Houwing, Sport24 chief writer
Cape Town – It is an inopportune moment for South Africa’s top rugby teams to be experiencing a collective dip in fortunes.
On Tuesday, after all, the British and Irish Lions squad to tour the country, as the Vodacom Super 14 ends, will be announced.
And it will coincide with the odd creased brow among the Springbok brains trust, you can be pretty sure.
Had the Lions party for the keenly-awaited three-Test series been named around a fortnight ago, national coach Peter de Villiers and company might well have greeted it with greater counter-bravado than they probably will now.
For it has been a bad weekend, and couple of weeks generally, for the South African Super 14 challenge, with the once-rampant Sharks and Bulls both losing: the Sharks for the second time on the trot, in the process dramatically widening the funnel in terms of semi-final contention.
And although the Lions will be drawn from a pool of players light years removed geographically from South Africa’s fiercest Antipodean rivals, it is nevertheless unfortunate and possibly educative that the latest round of Super 14 action shows the following harvest in direct one-on-one terms: SA teams 0, New Zealand teams 3.
Soul-search and regroup
That is the result of the Sharks and Cheetahs succumbing at home to the Crusaders and Chiefs respectively, and the increasingly bankrupt and airy-fairy Stormers finally taking the true roasting that has simply been waiting to happen for them: a 34-11 reverse to the Hurricanes.
At least South Africa showed some sense of weekend parity with Australia, the out-of-the-picture Lions earning a gritty, mild-upset win against the Reds in Brisbane to counter the Brumbies’ slightly fortuitous one-point triumph over the Bulls a day earlier.
It is not quite Disasterville for the country’s only two last-four contenders, because they have a clean run-in of home-soil matches, and the jaded Sharks, in particular, will be grateful for a bye this week that allows them to soul-search and regroup.
Indeed, get their acts together consistently for the last three or four games and both the Sharks and Bulls could yet secure all-important home semis.
But they do need to move up a gear because suddenly at least eight sides can claim to harbour realistic challenges for the last-four phase.
Knee trouble
The defending champion Crusaders, for instance, who were cock-a-hoop about their Richie McCaw-inspired 13-10 victory in a claret-splattered affair at Absa Stadium, sit in eighth spot on the table but they are only five points adrift of the log-leading Chiefs!
And a few other factors have conspired to make domestic fans a tad less gung-ho about the prospect of taming the Lions in a few weeks’ time.
For starters, a nasty little injury list among challengers for Bok places is beginning to mount: both Jean de Villiers and Johann Muller limped off for the Stormers and Sharks respectively with apparent knee trouble, and that fine loosehead scrummager Heinke van der Merwe is out of action for the Lions.
And a worrying on-field trend was prevalent during the latest Super 14 programme: South African teams scrambling and scurrying on defence – a stamina-sapping exercise, ultimately – and simply not getting onto the front foot for meaningful periods at all.
That applied virtually across the board, for even in the Lions’ deceptively comfortable 31-20 win against fellow-strugglers in Queensland, they relied on not much more than a miserly third of possession.
Second fiddle
What has become of the days of brawny, ruthlessly dominating SA packs?
It is true that our leading Super 14 sides preserve reputations for being fearless and physical in open-play terms. But quality primary possession, particularly at scrum-time, is becoming alarmingly scarce across the five SA franchises and they are struggling to achieve attacking field position.
The Sharks started like a house on fire in the set scrums, but then the Crusaders clawed back in that phase, while Bismarck du Plessis was too often out of sync with his jumpers in the lineouts, a key reason the Durban-based side played second fiddle on the day.
There was a great irony, indeed, seconds after Springbok captain and veteran hooker John Smit entered the fray in the 54th minute against the Crusaders.
Three meaty customers
Instead of at No 2, he replaced Jannie du Plessis at tighthead prop, and the other Du Plessis promptly threw a shocker of a long lineout throw that came within a whisker of conceding a try to the visitors as they gleefully stole possession.
One wondered whether it wasn’t, perhaps, an inadvertent message to Peter de Villiers: surely all the sage signs point to Smit being employed at hooker against the Lions, instead of the ill-advised, makeshift No 3?
A Bok front row comprising three meaty, prop-standard customers (I’m thinking Mtawarira, Smit, Van der Linde) against the scrum-happy might of the Northern Hemisphere suddenly seems to make an awful lot more sense than one comprising, at the end of the day, two hookers …
