Going in with the right attitude

It’s been a slow start to the rugby year, and I get a bit guilty when I realise that this weekend we head into the month of February and the off-season break is now extending to almost two months, which is the time that has elapsed since the Springboks ended their overseas tour.

A Springbok coach has been appointed, but otherwise it has been quiet, much quieter than this time last year. But there again, because it was a World Cup year, and hence a special one, the Super 14 started on the corresponding weekend in 2007, with the Stormers travelling to Bloemfontein to face the Cheetahs and the Sharks hosting the Bulls.

There is still two weeks to run until the start of the 2008 edition of the competition, which means we are now where we were around mid-January of last year. So maybe it explains why everything is still so low key.

The Stormers have played one warm-up game in Wellington, and then took away one other thing that could have been written about by cancelling the match against the Western Province Vodacom Cup side that was scheduled for Saturday.

The Bulls played the Falcons and then the Cavaliers, and have a few more warm-up matches still to play, while the Sharks and the Cheetahs both go into action for the first time this weekend when they face each other in what has become an annual pre-season friendly match.

So perhaps the perception that it is taking a while for the enthusiasm to warm up is understandable. The new season is still some way off, and maybe I am not alone in feeling a bit lazy.

There again, there is another possibility that could translate into an interesting challenge for the five South African Super 14 coaches, and in particular those that have several World Cup Springboks on their books.

And that possibility referred to is the inevitable comedown after a special year, one where everything was targeted to the World Cup in France, the culmination if you like of four years of preparation.

It was made more special of course by the fact that the Springboks won the tournament, and with the Bulls also having become the first local team to win the Super 14, it might be understandable if some individuals have the attitude that there are no more worlds to conquer and it has all been done already.

Those rugby writers who were covering the game after the 1995 event will recall how the province that dominated the Springbok team that won that World Cup, Transvaal, fell apart in the Currie Cup tournament that followed. The individual players had scaled the peak of rugby achievement, they found it difficult to motivate themselves for the domestic competition.

Indeed, maybe we shouldn’t really mince words here – for reasons that were perhaps understandable, it could probably be said that the World Cup Boks took on a bad attitude. You will recall how they were in the forefront of the attempt by a Kerry Packer style organisation to hijack rugby and steer it onto a new course, and then they irked the rest of the top rugby players from other nations by bailing at the last minute.

The Boks, as World Cup champions, were in a rebellious mood, and if my memory serves me correctly Ray Mordt was the poor Transvaal coach tasked with having to keep them focused.

Rugby players are now better looked after than they were back then at the start of the professional era, so there is no good reason why we should go through the same painful process again. Considering though the emotional and physical energy invested in last year’s achievements, it might be understandable though if some players do return to their franchises feeling, as the old army phrase would have it, “a bit narfy” and perhaps with a bit of attitude.

Yet while there is no World Cup in 2008, South African rugby does still have a lot to prove. For a start, New Zealanders will be going all out to ensure there is a repeat of 1996, when the South Africans came a poor second to them in both the Tri-Nations and Super competition.

Let’s hope then that the individual players are not making as sluggish a start to the new year as this scribe is. The time for holidaying is over, the next four-year cycle will start in just a fortnight, and the South African rugby public, always hungry for success, will be even more expectant and demanding now that 2007 provided a heady taste of what it feels like to be a winner.