It’s wide open this year

Those who don’t like it can stamp their feet as much as they like, they can scream their unhappiness, but here is the reality: there will be no Super 14 prediction from this columnist this year.

Some might suggest this is a cop-out because last year I got it wrong. But that is not the case. My prediction in 2006 was that the Crusaders would win it (well doesn’t that make me such an expert!) and I can recall attracting some derision from readers who felt I was way too optimistic about the Sharks.

Remember that at the start of last year many South Africans expected Dick Muir’s team to foot the table. My feeling to the contrary was directed chiefly by a couple of pre-season visits to the Sharks training sessions, where I was quite impressed by the depth they had available.

Well, I haven’t been to the Shark Tank recently, but I have been to Stormers training sessions, and saw them play a few pre-season games. As with the trip to Durban last year what grabbed the attention was the greater depth that appears to be available to the franchise.

But before you start thinking that I have pulled on one of those new blue Stormers jerseys, allow me to point out that I have a strong suspicion that I would think the same after a visit to every local franchise with the possible exception of the Lions.

Until the injury bogey struck them in Durban last Wednesday, the Cheetahs squad looked a lot stronger on paper than it did 12 months ago. Pierre Spies has emerged as a world-class talent and Wynand Olivier has matured beyond belief since the Bulls last played a Super 14 match, and the youngsters who were playing their first big rugby this time last year for the Sharks are now one year more experienced.

And even those who want to write off the Lions should be reminded that some interesting things started to happen at the Johannesburg union after Eugene Eloff took over, and in the last two months of the Currie Cup season they tasted only victory. My money says they will miss Wikus van Heerden and have to rely too heavily on André Pretorius, but you never know.

Faced with all of this knowledge, and having gone through the exercise of assessing the back-up for each position in every South African franchise, and discovering that in most instances the local teams can afford the odd injury, it was Cheetahs coach Rassie Erasmus who eventually convinced me of the folly of making any sort of prediction.

Erasmus, looking back at last year in an interview with The Sunday Times, reminded us that “for ten games last year we won five of them…We could have lost all ten of them or won them all.”

Erasmus is spot on. Just out of the top of my head, I can recall his team losing in the last minute to the Bulls, but then being quite fortunate to scrape home in a nail-biter against the Sharks in Durban. There were other games involving the Cheetahs that went down to the wire, such as their victory in Cape Town against the Stormers, and there is a recollection of one of the overseas teams beating them on the hooter in Bloemfontein after coming back from the dead.

But the Cheetahs were not the only side that had this sort of experience. Apart from the match against the Cheetahs that has already been mentioned, the Stormers lost a good couple of matches in the very last minutes of the game.

My prediction last year was that they would finish mid-table. They finished just off it, but would have been better than mid-table had they not squandered an 11-point lead with four minutes to go against the Hurricanes and had they managed to do more than just draw with the Brumbies etc etc.

And the Bulls would have booked themselves a home semifinal last year were it not for their off-day against the Highlanders at Loftus, another one against the Reds, and who would have predicted the TMO fluff that denied them victory against the Hurricanes?

Yet, were it not for the way the Stormers fell apart in their last match of the season, just two weeks after a deserved win over the Crusaders, it would have been the Sharks, and not the Bulls, who would have been in the semifinals.

All of this is to illustrate a point, and that is that Erasmus is right – last year was far more competitive, and with the exception of the Cats, few of the South African teams were consistently outplayed in the competition.

That is why, in my view, four of the five local teams do have a chance of making the semifinals this year – it all just hinges on luck and, to a large extent on the draw. The Bulls, the Stormers and the Cheetahs do have incredibly tough draws, and as the team with the greatest depth, the Bulls should be the favoured one of that triumvirate, but the Sharks have an excellent draw, and on this basis could be South Africa’s best bet overall.

There again, the Sharks last year had the sort of draw that the Bulls have this year, and they damn nearly made the top four. So with the New Zealand teams all an unknown quantity because of the absence of the All Blacks, plus question marks over whether they even care about Super 14 success in this year so dominated for them by the World Cup, you’ll have to forgive me this year for shying away from a prediction.

It’s wide open, and we could be in for our most interesting Super competition since 1999.