Playing more means quality suffers

I think it was Hennie le Roux who, while he was still playing in the 1990s, first made the point that the more rugby you play, the more the quality of your performance suffers.

After watching the first three weeks of this inaugural Super 14 season, I daresay he may have been right. There has long been an impression created that some of the teams choose particular games to put in a big effort, and then on other occasions they appear to engage cruise control.

The Crusaders, for instance, have often appeared to struggle in particular games during the course of the season, often against teams they are expected to beat easily. I remember a couple of years ago the Cats taking quite a big early lead against them in Christchurch, only for the hosts to power back and win comfortably once they engaged top gear.

It was either last year or the season before that, when the Crusaders only pulled away in the last minutes of a match against the Cats on New Zealand soil. Everyone lauded the Cats afterwards for a great effort and for being much more competitive than anticipated.

However it was noticeable in this match that the every time the Cats scored to get back within range, the Crusaders struck back with a score down the other end to restore the comfort of a lead of more than seven points.

When teams have toured to South Africa, there have also been times when they have clearly pinpointed particular matches for a big effort. If a team like the Crusaders had scored a good win over the Stormers at Newlands, there was always a good chance they would falter the following week in Pretoria, or vice-versa.

Yet now that there are an extra two games added on to the competition, it may be getting worse. We have only now entered into the month of March, and there was a time when the last week of February signaled the start of the competition. As it stands this year, the teams have already played three matches, whereas in previous years they would have played one at most.

The Hurricanes have started like they have a plane to catch, and top the log with 15 points. But in their match against the Western Force two weeks ago, they only really played for the first 20 minutes. Once they had established their lead, they went off the boil, and in the end they battled to grab the bonus point for the fourth try.

They played in fits and starts again last weekend against the Cats, and so far their only really top effort, where they produced a really compelling performance, was in the opener against the Blues (where in fact they only really played after halftime!).

The Waratahs, in their opening Super 14 tour match against the Stormers, were very good, and they were sharp. The Stormers raised their level of performance in the first half, but couldn’t last the pace in the second, where they cried out for their absent midfield playmaker Jean de Villiers and also lost the plot a bit in the lineouts.

Good though the Waratahs were, however, some of the Stormers management members told me afterwards that they thought the Bulls would beat them in Pretoria the following week. This assessment was made not on the basis that they thought there was anything special about the Bulls, but because they felt the Waratahs, in picking up five points at Newlands, had achieved their primary objective in South Africa of winning at least one of the two matches.

It was the same with the Brumbies. The side that stumbled its way to a 15-all draw against the Stormers last Friday night was not the same razor-sharp unit that beat the Bulls the previous week.

And not wishing to take anything away from the Sharks, who surprised friend and foe with the competitiveness of their showing in Timaru, it was a similar story with the Crusaders. Battle though they did, you somehow always just had the feeling that the champions would scrape through in the end, which they did.

A few weeks back I wrote that the Super 14 is going to be a bit more like an ultra-marathon than a marathon. In these early stages of the Super 14, it would appear that this prediction may be correct. The big guns are making sure they are well placed in the van of the field early on, but in almost every instance you get the impression that they are conserving energy by choosing which hills to expend effort and which hills to cruise.

It is a reality of this longer competition which I have to admit had me yawning at stages of last weekend’s action.