Perhaps the Sharks would still have lost as badly as they did in Treviso had they not played a tough set of Currie Cup games ahead of the kickoff to the United Rugby Championship (URC) season, but it looked suspiciously as if coach John Plumtree had his fear realised.
The ridiculous SA rugby scheduling, which set the Currie Cup for the off-season and the deciding rounds for the critical final fortnight before the start of the URC, caught up with his team. Plumtree isn’t prone to making excuses, but he hasn’t been shy to be critical of the 12-month treadmill rugby is on in SA.
He used the word fatigue in his postmatch interview. Fatigue at this stage of the new season? Well yes, if you’ve started off the new season with six consecutive tough games, starting with the final domestic league game against the Bulls, and one of those games was a semifinal that went to 100 minutes, there will be fatigue.
All but the first of those games was away from home too, which answers the question some might want to ask referencing the Lions, who had a similar schedule to the Sharks and yet have got off to a better start in the URC. Until Sunday’s game against the Dragons, all the Lions’ games were at home. I strongly suspect that their commitment to Currie Cup success will end up biting the Lions later in the season.
There’s a lot going right with SA rugby, at least at Springbok level, but questions have to be asked about the sustainability of having a 12-month season and having the national team committed to the southern hemisphere Rugby Championship when this country is now aligned to the northern season.
In fact, participation in the northern hemisphere competitions, which I have generally been positive about, probably deserves more interrogation too. Being forced to play understrength for a considerable proportion of the season, something that never happened in Super Rugby, may be good for creating all-round depth. But is it appetising for supporters who want to see their top team play?
The Sharks will only finally be at full strength when Glasgow Warriors visit them on Saturday. The Stormers have opted to wait another week before reintroducing their Boks because coach John Dobson is boxing clever around Bok resting protocols. He has given his Boks three weeks off now so they will be available later in the season.
Much adjusting is being done to ensure SA players get their allotted eight weeks off in the year. But not doing it in one block, meaning a two-month off-season as in every other rugby country, surely means conditioning is compromised. There are probably psychological impacts too, for if their teams are playing in competitions while they are resting, do the resting players ever really properly switch off?
While on the subject of the negatives of the URC, let’s get to the refereeing. Maybe we complained about the refereeing during the Super Rugby era — we definitely did — but from my memory there was never the level of refereeing incompetence that is showcased weekly in the URC.
While the Sharks underperformed on their URC tour due to the scheduling, the Stormers, though they did also conspire against themselves in their most recent loss to Edinburgh, were mostly done in by refereeing.
Eyebrows might be raised at a suggestion that the referee cost the Stormers in Edinburgh, for they lost 38-7. But it was just 14-7, and the Stormers had already had two tries disallowed, when referee Ben Whitehouse inexplicably missed a blatant case of hands in the ruck that secured Edinburgh the turnover from which they transferred pressure and scored the try that took them more than a score ahead with a quarter of the game left.
That was the killer for the Stormers in a game in which just about every 50/50 call went against them, and it wasn’t the first time on tour either. In their opening defeat to the Ospreys they queried five scrum calls that went against them and, according to assistant coach Rito Hlungwani, the URC officials agreed on every one. Unfortunately it was after the event so those were costly refereeing errors in a close game.
The frustration with referees shouldn’t have been limited to Stormers fans either. The Bulls did what is needed by SA teams overseas if they are going to beat the referees by taking a big early lead, but that was nearly undone by the way the referee kowtowed to the whims of the crowd — every time the crowd groaned he checked the screen — and thus kept the Ospreys in the game when they shouldn’t have been close.
Referees do have a difficult job and it is often the law that is the ass, but the weak, incompetent refereeing does the URC no favours.
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