The Lions’ win over Connacht at the weekend may have eased some of the pressure that was building after a string of five consecutive defeats but the pall of negativity hanging over Ellis Park will only properly lift if they clinch a United Rugby Championship (URC) playoff spot and the qualification for the Champions Cup that goes with it.
We are coming to the end of the fourth season of the URC and the Lions have yet to finish in the top half of the 16-team competition. That represents failure for the franchise that was the most successful of the SA participants in the latter part of the Super Rugby era, with three successive appearances in the final in 2016-2018.
Even if the Lions do somehow sneak into the top eight, they have slipped a long way from the run of relative success they started by winning the Currie Cup in 2015 — in other words exactly 10 years ago. That moment is relevant because the memory of what inspired those seasons of Lions strength, and the misguided belief that by using the same recipe it can be repeated, may be a big part of the reason the Lions are where they are now.
Predictably, coach Cash van Rooyen and his coaching staff have been in the media firing line, and they have been defended by some players. It’s not the first time Van Rooyen has been under fire so perhaps there is validity to the arguments against his continuation as coach, but for me it goes way beyond who is coaching the Lions.
When you look at the SA rugby landscape, what really beggars belief is that the economic heartland of this country is represented by the franchise that appears to have the least financial muscle and which definitely lags behind all others when it comes to player recruitment and retention.
When the promising young flyhalf Kade Wolhuter sustained yet another big injury the Stormers — in the knowledge they had an excellent starting pivot in Manie Libbok and two other talented players in Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu and Jurie Matthee on their books — let him go to the Lions. It was initially on loan, then it became permanent.
Two players mostly overlooked by the Sharks, Marius Louw and Sanele Nohamba, also made their way to Johannesburg but both are now on their way again. There are more exits than entrances and one of the Lions’ best players around whom so much happens, Edwill van der Merwe, who moved from the Stormers a few years ago, is headed to the Sharks next season.
There he will join several other Lions stars of recent vintage in Jordan Hendrikse, the two Tshituka brothers and Ruan Dreyer in playing for the coastal team. The Lions don’t buy big and they don’t retain their best players, which makes them a modern version of what the Cheetahs used to be to the Sharks — an exporter of talent over the Drakensberg.
The Lions actually started off this season really well, and there was talk of a top four finish in those early days. But the questionable decision to take the Currie Cup seriously, meaning that several URC players had more off-season action than they should have, was always going to come back to bite them later on. Which it did. Against Benetton the Lions just looked like a team that had punched itself out.
The continuity between the Currie Cup team and the one that played Super Rugby was a driver of Lions success 10 years ago, but it is a different world now and the Lions just don’t have the depth to be competitive across three competitions and a 12-month season. And until the arrival lounge at the Lions is doing business on par with what goes through the exit lounge, no coach is going to succeed.
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