Where the southern game falls short

Whereas a wave of euphoria would be misplaced, the first round of the Super 12 also did not provide much reason for South African rugby fans to start gnashing their teeth.

It really is hard to say too much about the South African input to the Super 12 at this juncture. This is usually the stage of the season where the cynics dredge up that hoary old crack about the weekend at least producing two South African winners, something which is seldom a given in the rest of the Super 12 season.

But there was at least one reason for optimism - with the notable exception of the AJ Venter incident at Newlands, the local derbies did not produce the testosterone overload of previous seasons.

And there were signs, unmistakeable signs, that the intensive use of local top referees to help the South African teams prepare themselves for the Super 12 season could reap handsome dividends.

The Sharks were heavily penalised in the early part of their game against the Stormers and the Cats conceded enough penalties to allow Louis Koen to rack up a mammoth haul of points, but for the most part the usual confusion over refereeing interpretations was absent.

Indeed, compared to some of the overseas games shown this weekend on television, it could be said that South African players might even be slightly ahead of their overseas opponents when it comes to picking up on the new interpretations.

But this is where another cautionary note has to be introduced - if it is discovered in the next few weeks that the South African interpretations are different to those of the New Zealand and Australian refs, it would not be the first time.

South Africa's old friend Stuart Dickinson was at his pedantic best in the match he officiated in at the weekend, while if memory serves me correctly, the Stormers will be running into Peter Marshall sometime in the next two weeks. That will be the acid test.

All of this talk of referees takes me back to something said during a media presentation given by local lad Mark Lawrence earlier this year.

In illustrating a point, Lawrence said certain areas of the union game were going to be refereed a little differently so that the code does not start to bear too close a resemblence to rugby league. Lawrence added that the league game was boring.

At the time I wondered if the Australians who slavishly support it at the expense of the union code would agree with him. But I did not have to wait long in this year's Super 12 to get a reminder of what he might have meant by his statement.

Perhaps this is not something I should readily admit, but there were times in the opening match between the Chiefs and the Highlanders that sleep felt extremely close at hand. It was boring and it was the resemblence to the league game that made it such.

For much of the game, the action was reminiscent of the modern version of touch rugby, with the ball carrier moving towards the tackler and then setting it up to make it available to a support player, who would then send it into its inevitable next hit, the process being repeated over and over and over again...

What kept me awake was the knowledge that what I was seeing might be at the heart of the supposed southern hemisphere losing streak against the bigger northern hemisphere teams.

With the Six Nations on at the same time, it was easy to see the stark contrast in the northern and southern approaches.

Whereas the Six Nations teams still use a forward pack as that, the Super 12 teams, or at least the ones in action at Hamilton, tend to go into the contact with just two or three forwards, with the opposing team committing just three or four forwards to a defensive role in each successive ruck.

This enables them to fan the rest of the forwards out into defensive roles, where they wait for the next hit and the whole process just repeats itself (making the game resemble three of five-down touch). There is little of the cohesive forward driving that marks rugby in the northern hemisphere.

Three years ago, when England beat South Africa in Bloemfontein, Clive Woodward remarked to English journalists that the match had proved his point about the southern hemisphere game. He felt the southern teams were making the mistake of being at a disadvantage in numbers at the contact points.

My editor of the time never thought the story was important enough to run in the newspaper I was working for, but I thought the comments were hugely significant.

Krynauw Otto, the Springbok lock of the time, further validated those comments by stating that he agreed a change of approach would be necessary from southern teams if they were to stand up to the northern forward threat.

The rugby in the Tri-Nations is not quite as loose as that we see in the Super 12, but it has to be asked again if the style of play that we become used to in the regional competition helps the southern hemisphere players prepare for the northern challenge they will face later in the year.

Of course, as one fellow rugby writer remarked when this observation was made during the Stormers/Sharks match the other night, the argument falls flat if you agree that New Zealand rugby at the moment appears to be flourishing.

But even if the New Zealand second team came close to beating England at Twickenham three months ago, it is still a fact that their forwards were flattened in that match, and I reckon their first choice pack might have met with the same fate.

So maybe we will only really know the answers when the World Cup arrives on our screens later this year, by which time it might be too late to make adjustments.