The outstanding performance and effort they had to put in to dispatch Leinster in the United Rugby Championship (URC) semifinal the week before introduced a sense of foreboding about how the Bulls might fare in the Loftus decider.
Rugby history is rife with instances where teams, when they get to the game that will determine whether they end the season as champions or also-rans, find they played their final a week early.
That was the sense I got from England after their annihilation of New Zealand in the semifinal of the 2019 World Cup in Japan. They weren’t players, but a group of England supporters encountered in the lift of my Tokyo hotel the day after their team had beaten the All Blacks set the tone for the buildup to the final.
“No, I am going home, yesterday was the final,” said one when asked if he’d be staying the extra week to watch the decider.
It is hard to back up a really good performance and win against a highly rated team, with all the hype that comes with it, a week later. During the RWC final week in Tokyo I was a guest on the podcast of the London newspaper, The Times, and the other participants laughed at me when I suggested the Springboks had a good chance.
My confidence was based around the way the English media and supporters were behaving. Comments such as “That was the best England performance ever”, and that from a veteran English scribe who has seen everything.
The Bulls coach Jake White has seen everything so he would have been working to keep his players on edge and remind them the trophy was not won by beating Leinster. Sometimes though you can talk as much as you like and it won’t have effect. For me there was always too much similarity in the expectations around the Bulls to what the Stormers faced when they hosted Munster in the 2023 final.
The games were quite similar too, in the sense that the visiting team was the dominant one but it was the hosts who led most of the way before the visitors snatched it late in the game. The Stormers were six minutes away from making it back to back URC titles in Cape Town, the Bulls were 12 minutes away. In both instances, the better team won.
On the way to the final the Glasgow Warriors also played a big semifinal and won against the odds. But the difference between them and the Bulls is that they were traveling across the equator. That would have given them an edge and sense of unease the Bulls, playing a third successive home playoff game at a venue where they had never lost a knock-out clash, didn’t have.
This is not to denigrate the Glasgow performance. The Warriors are a top team and they have a top coach. If there is some consolation for South Africans from the Bulls defeat, it is that the home loss was scripted by an outstanding SA coach in Franco Smith.
The former Springbok centre is known for his love of the running game, and his team showed that in the final, but he is also pragmatic — you can’t run everyone off their feet in every game, you have to have other strengths, and Glasgow happen to have the best maul in the URC.
With Johann van Graan taking Bath to their first English Premiership final in a while and Johan Ackermann having guided his team into the first division in Japan, SA currently has some really astute coaches working overseas.
While his team lost the final, White has also reconfirmed his standing as one of the top rugby coaches on the planet, and Stormers coach John Dobson is at the very least up there with him. Let’s not forget Leinster-based World Cup winner Jacques Nienaber either.
Combine all of those names and it becomes apparent the fear some have about what would happen to the Boks if Rassie Erasmus vacated the national job may be unfounded. There was a time SA was short of good coaches, but not anymore.
Not that anyone would want Erasmus to leave. He was the main influence behind successive World Cup wins, and he’s made a good start to the next World Cup cycle with his selections and the team performance in the Twickenham game against Wales.
He was the first to acknowledge the 41-13 win did not come about through a perfect performance, but then he wouldn’t have wanted that. The last thing Erasmus would have wanted was his team to head into the first Test against Ireland less than a fortnight from now feeling they were invincible. Which might have happened had Wales just laid down and died after the Boks scored two early tries.
There is work to do, there is fine-tuning to do, but the Boks did achieve their mission of bleeding in new players while picking up the win that ensures they head to Loftus with some momentum.
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