The Bulls are becoming like England

There may have been some who would be ready to accuse Blue Bulls coach Heyneke Meyer of arrogance when they read comments attributed to him in a newspaper article about the forthcoming battles with Western Province.

Asked whether he was contemplating putting an under-strength team into the field for this week’s final Currie Cup league game, Meyer responded thus: “Whatever team we send out, it will definitely be good enough to beat Province.”

But Meyer was not being arrogant. He was just telling the truth. While WP have enough talent in their outfit to shock the Bulls on a given day, it is self-evident that Meyer has built up so much depth through the systems he has put in place at Loftus that his team can make dramatic switches in personnel from one week to the next and still win.

We saw it last year. Whereas this season it has been WP who have suffered most for international call-ups, in 2003 it was the Bulls. Yet the Bulls still won the Currie Cup quite comfortably in the end, with the Sharks well beaten in the final and WP finishing third on the log.

That showed the depth that the Bulls have available, it must also have been a massive boost to confidence. It has showed this year, with the Bulls again doing well in the period the Boks were away, and more importantly consistently showing that indefinable championship quality that enables you to keep winning even when you are not playing all that well.

Many would have thought the Bulls were going to be defeated this past Saturday when the Cheetahs were all over them at stages of the first half in Bloemfontein. Yet the Bulls weathered the storm and did not concede the points that a lesser team would have. Even when they were behind at halftime, you sensed that there was no real panic and they did enough in the second half to draw the game.

In many ways this unflappability and calmness under pressure is similar to England in the seasons from about 2000 building up to last year’s World Cup. One of the hallmarks of England’s rise was the way critics kept labelling them boring and kept predicting that they would be found out.

Yet it was the rigid way they stuck to the structures and maintained their discipline that ensured that ultimately they were able to go all the way to World Cup glory.

It has to some extent been the same with the Bulls, although they have scored far more tries and certainly don’t justify the dinosaur tag that was given to the Sharks a few years ago when they were playing a no-nonsense, conservative brand of rugby under the coaching of Rudolf Straeuli.

Indeed, where the Bulls might differ a bit from England is in precisely this area. England for a long time looked like they only had a plan A, which admittedly worked very effectively and Jonny Wilkinson and the forwards complied by never letting them down (admittedly there were also times later on when England played a far more expansive style).

The Bulls, when they were missing key forwards last year, showed that they could play a different game when necessary. Before the new players in the pack settled down, Meyer’s men shifted away from the forward orientated style of the previous year. The 60-pointer against WP at Loftus certainly saw plenty of good running rugby from the Bulls and they completely outdid a team renowned for its flair and flashiness.

So what is it that keeps the Bulls winning? In the end, like with England and Clive Woodward, most of it can be attributed to Meyer. Like Woodward, Meyer did not have an auspicious start to his tenureship as coach of his current team. As deposed Super 12 coach Rudy Joubert reminded us recently, the Bulls only won one of 22 games when he was in charge.

But the fact that Meyer may in 2002 have been only a defeat or two away from being axed as coach of the Blue Bulls Currie Cup team only serves to underline that sometimes these things can be a lottery. It is incumbent upon the administration to see whether a coach has a plan, and whether he can follow that plan through. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes when they get it wrong they can end up sacking a coach too early.

Had that happened at the end of the 2002 Super 12 season, where the Bulls finished last on the log by some distance, I doubt very much that the Bulls would today be where they are. And by extension, the Springboks wouldn’t be where they are either.

And it should not surprise to learn that Meyer drew heavily on the England experience. During the 2001 Springbok tour of France, Britain and the USA, Meyer was present as an assistant coach. He availed himself of the opportunity to study the English system, and when the Boks flew out of London he quite excitedly engaged journalists in a conversation about how incredibly professional the England system was.

That professionalism has been introduced at the Bulls, and it is the reason they are successful. That professionalism is expressed on the field through the efficiency with which the Bulls stick to their structure and the organisation they display when they come through to clean out a ruck or start another movement.

Off the field the Bulls professionalism is shown in the care that is taken to ensure succession planning by making sure age-group rugby is strong, and that as much detail is put into these other supposedly less significant levels of the game as is put into the preparation of the Currie Cup side.

In many ways the Bulls have taken over from the Sharks (my, that does seem like a long time ago now!), as the flag-bearers of professionalism in our rugby. It interested me to learn for instance that John McFarland is no longer the technical adviser of the Bulls team, but the defence coach.

You don’t get this degree of specialisation in many other provinces, if any, and it is one of the reasons why the Bulls are bidding for a third successive Currie Cup title.

In some unions you sometimes get the impression that they feel talent should be the main ingredient required for ensuring success. The Bulls, over the past few years, have shown that this is not enough and that good teams are built through a combination of focus on improvement of the individual and meticulous attention to what it takes to mould those individuals into a team.

I strongly fancy that when Meyer takes the till of the same ship and steers it into the more turbulent waters of the Super 12 next year that the efficiency of the machine will ensure that he erases the doubts over his ability to take it to a different level.