A lesson from the past

OK Sharks fans, listen up. Do you want to know why your team lost the Bankfin Currie Cup Final in spite of having so much possession? Read on.

Every now and then you come across a piece of writing that makes real sense… such as the following lines, written by a famous coach, that I thought I’d pass on.

“Often you may appear the better team. You appear to be superior in most phases of the game; you have a territorial advantage; you have played copy-book rugby, yet tries do seem to elude you.

“An inferior fifteen had your efforts muzzled and they did the scoring!

“Why? (This is no time to be critical of the referee! It is no use saying that it is “just one of those days” and accidents do happen – very often they are caused). “Your team simply set them no serious threat or problem. The opposition could cope with the puerile simplicity and the “obviousness” of your attack.

“This slavish pursuit of the obvious or the blind adherence to a pre-determined blueprint or stale recipes consisting of touch-kicking interspersed with a few sporadic and cold-fingered attacking raids launched only when in the enemy quarter of the field (and squandering possession in the larger part of it) brought you little reward.

“Perhaps you were wary of making mistakes; perhaps you were obsessed with the importance of not losing, and in that, you became unmindful of the real way of winning.

“The fact remains that your team or its leadership showed no flexible approach, no tactical appreciation and no positive reaction to the demands of the match. Your attack was founded on the rigidity of single-tracked ideas which led to hesitancy, inhibition, frustration and ineffectualness.

“You showed no imagination or variation in your method of attack, only the barrenness of your tactical inadaptability! You showed no daring or desire to lay a multi-laned track to the try-line to outwit a simple direct defence.”

There you have it Sharkies… a pithy summation of how your team played in the final.

Who wrote it? None other than the late Izak van Heerden in his book “Target Try-line” that was published in 1965. The passage was contained in a chapter prophetically entitled “A new approach”