That isolation hammers your game has been a recurring theme of the SA rugby narrative ever since the Bulls got thumped in the Rainbow Cup final in May, but it is becoming apparent it is something you can recover from quickly.
By beating the All Blacks last week at the end of a home season where they also won a series against the British & Irish Lions after a 19-month hiatus from Test rugby, the world champion Springboks showed they are not that far off the pace. If indeed they are at all. By the admission of coach Jacques Nienaber, they may be a year behind in terms of post-World Cup rugby, but they are still at least on a par with the New Zealanders.
And then this past weekend, the SA teams in the United Rugby Championship (URC) proceeded to make nonsense of the perception that they were way behind their European opponents. Any optimism after a weekend where two teams won, the other drew and the other lost narrowly should be weighed up against the knowledge that none of the Irish teams were in opposition. It is the Irish that have been ahead of the rest in what was formerly the Pro14 over the past few years.
Nonetheless, given that the SA teams are playing this phase of the URC away from home and are understrength because of Bok commitments, it is starting to look a lot more positive. For instance, the Sharks won 27-13 in Swansea and they have 12 players missing to the Boks. Imagine what they’d do at home to the Ospreys if playing at full strength.
The Stormers are also missing seven players to the Boks if you factor in Rosco Speckman, who though officially still a Cheetah is expected to be a Stormer by the time the 2021 international season is over. And while the Bulls don’t have as many players absent, they will also welcome back personnel and delivered a much better performance against Cardiff Blues. At least they did in the second half.
The Lions have been a bit unlucky with injury, particularly at flyhalf, but won their opening game and have been competitive in all three, so even though many have written them off, they could be a handful for opposition teams that visit them at Ellis Park.
The local teams are having to adjust to a level of professionalism and drilling in their opponents that is alien to them, and their low error rate and generally good discipline means you just can’t afford to waste chances in the URC.
In that regard, the Stormers probably cost themselves what would have been a well-deserved win over Edinburgh through their failure to be patient and convert pressure into points on the several occasions they were in the opposition red zone. Of course, they also made it difficult for themselves with the two defensive lapses that saw them trail 14-0 after just six minutes.
That they fought back and were left to rue missed opportunities to win the game in the last quarter is, however, a sign of progress, and that progress is happening quickly. On the subject of the Stormers, their skills coach, Labeeb Levy, did touch on a subject before their game that reminded me of my one reservation about SA no longer being part of Super Rugby.
Levy suggested that the way to overcome the well-organised and coached foreign teams was to inject some of the flash of the southern hemisphere game into the SA approach. He was speaking mainly about offloads, something the Stormers stunned Munster with in the first half of their second game before eventually falling away to a combination of indiscipline and lack of maturity in their decision making. That aspect of their game, meaning willingness to offload, was again to the fore against Edinburgh.
As I wrote in this column two weeks ago, the South Africans are probably going to be hurt less by their exclusion from Super Rugby than the Kiwis are, and already we are seeing the variations in not only conditions but also playing style that the local teams will be exposed to by moving to the north.
The Ospreys team the Sharks beat on Friday night play a different style to the previous week’s opponents, the fast-tempo Glasgow Warriors, who were set on that path by former Chiefs and now Wallaby coach Dave Rennie. The Warriors in turn were different to their opening opponents, Munster.
The Stormers were also up against a very different challenge in the form of Edinburgh to what they faced in their previous games against Benetton and Munster.
However, now that they don’t play New Zealand opponents regularly and therefore don’t have the same exposure to their offload game, the SA teams and players are going to have to actively work at retaining those aspects of the Kiwi game that rubbed off on them in the Super Rugby years.
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