Should not be a lottery

If the past two weekends of Super 14 rugby have proved anything, it is that massive all-out forward efforts in which a team throws the kitchen sink and much more than that at an opponent cannot be sustained for a full 80 minutes.

The Bulls did everything but bury the Sharks in their match at Loftus. Their first half performance was awesome, and when they rattled up the points before the break there must have been some Sharks supporters who would have feared a defeat similar to the 62-6 massacre suffered by the 1991 Natal team in a Lion Cup final at Loftus.

Sharks coach Dick Muir would remember that game as he played in it. A couple of weeks earlier the Natalians had smashed the Bulls (then known as Northern Transvaal) at King’s Park, winning 54-15 in a match where they posted the half-century with a full 20 minutes remaining.

Some anticipated a repeat at Loftus, but from the opening minutes it was clear this was not going to happen as the Bulls swarmed all over the Natalians, exerting unbelievable pressure which told on their opponents.

There was a big difference though between that Bulls team and the current one: The Northern Transvaal win in 1991 was not just built around their awesome pack of forwards, but also the genius of one Naas Botha, who was wearing their No10 jersey.

It was because of Botha’s ability to kick the ball both great distances and also very accurately that the Natalians were so comprehensively outplayed that day. As they are both now working for Supersport, I wonder if Joel Stransky and Botha might remember their respective roles that day.

For the record, Stransky was not at his usual flyhalf position, but at fullback. This move was made by the Natal coach Ian McIntosh, who was to some extent pressured into doing so by a certain Supersportzone correspondent, who was then working for the Natal Mercury.

It was my contention then that Stransky at fullback would be a good move as it would accommodate a fine running flyhalf by the name of Michael Praschma. Actually, if the truth be told, my initial drive was to have Henry Coxwell in the No10 jersey, but he ended up injuring himself at just the wrong time.

The lobby to have Stransky play fullback was not completely without merit, and it had worked a charm a couple of weeks previously in the Lion Cup semifinal at Ellis Park against Transvaal. Stransky’s debut for Natal, believe it or not, was also at fullback, where he played, and starred, as a late replacement for Hugh Reece-Edwards in a Currie Cup match in Windhoek in the late 1980s.

But Botha, the grand master, was able to do what Hennie le Roux had failed to do before him by exploiting Stransky’s newness to the fullback position. The key was that the Bulls forwards were able to provide him with front-foot ball, but the reason for all this nostalgia is to point out that the Bulls drive to victory that day was built around not just the pack alone.

You get different types of game-breakers. Botha, who had not played in the earlier mentioned defeat at King’s Park, was definitely a game-breaker. And in his era, he was probably every bit as good as Dan Carter was for the Crusaders against the Bulls last Friday night.

If you have a player like Botha or Carter in the No10 jersey, forward dominance is almost always going to lead to a big win, and the ferocious forward assault can be maintained for the bulk of the 80 minutes.

But the Bulls against the Sharks, and the Sharks this past weekend in their first half against the Stormers, were intent on carrying everything to the opposition. Ettienne Fynn, the former Sharks and Bok prop now working as a Supersport commentator, said exactly what I was thinking when he warned during the first half that “The Sharks must be careful they don’t run out of steam”.

When a colleague sent me an sms at halftime of that game saying how woeful the Stormers were at Absa Stadium, I sent a reply which read “Hold the phone, this game is not over yet. I think I have seen this movie before”.

And I had – a week earlier at Loftus, when the battered Sharks nearly came back to steal it, and on countless other occasions, such as the 1993 Currie Cup final, where Natal built their entire game around Wahl Bartmann and battered away for an entire half with their human battering ram only for it to be repelled by Francois Pienaar and the rest of his organized and committed Transvaal defenders.

The Natalians were ahead at the break, but they had not scored enough points, and in the second half it was the Transvaal players who had the energy and the momentum.

Some of the games mentioned here were played long ago, and rugby has changed. But it hasn’t changed that much. If you put all your eggs in one basket, you turn rugby into a lottery. And that holds as true today as it did in 1991 and 1993.