Stalwarts Griquas and Pumas look ahead

If there’s one thing you can set your clock by since the advent of the SuperSport Rugby Challenge, it is that when the knockout stages roll around the Pumas and the Tafel Lager Griquas will be there, elbowing for room at the business end of the tournament.

Griquas have made all three finals in the competition’s young history, unfortunately winning none of them while the Pumas were quarterfinalists in year one, won last year and are the defending champions in a repeat of last year’s final.

With the might of DHL Western Province, the Vodacom Blue Bulls, the Xerox Golden Lions and the Cell C Sharks also in the competition, the question is why do the Pumas and Griquas dominate the tournament to the point where they are meeting in the final for the second year in succession.

All manner of theories abound, but as ever, Pumas coach Jimmy Stonehouse – never backward about coming forward with an opinion – was pretty forthright about why he thinks this is the case at this level.

“The answer for me is easy,” he began. “If you look at these two teams, these are our best teams that we’re playing. Griquas’ best team is playing, our best team is playing because these are the teams we’re going into the Currie Cup with.

“Teams like Western Province, the Cheetahs, etc, play with juniors, so it’s difficult for them because their juniors are preparing for something else and are being taught to play at a higher level. So if Griquas and Pumas don’t do well in the SuperSport Rugby Challenge and want do compete in the Currie Cup, something is very wrong because how would they perform there?”

Griquas coach Brent Janse van Rensburg – himself a former Pumas coach just a year ago when they won the Rugby Challenge title – was a little more nuanced in his response to why all roads in this tournament seem to lead to a Griquas-Pumas final.

“A lot of people would say it’s because we’ve got continuity in our squads so we can prepare and keep the team together. But we haven’t had that luxury at Griquas this year, we had a large number of our players playing Pro14 and Varsity Cup so we didn’t have a very good pre-season.

“For us our players want to improve because they weren’t happy with the last two year. We wanted to focus on lifting the standards and making sure we fight for them and raise our expectations of each other.

“The guys are hungry to improve, hungry to play a higher level of competition, and the Griquas players are always hardened players that have potential and want to prove themselves. That’s probably the biggest reason why the Griquas and Pumas players keep fighting as they do – they’ve got some talented players who want to prove they’re good enough for higher honours.”

While many may look at the might of the Super Rugby franchise teams and suggest they are overstating their struggles to put teams together, what with their selection from unused Super Rugby players and talented under-21 players who train at the same heightened tempo their seniors do.

But Lions coach Sean Erasmus echoes many coaches in his position when he says playing second fiddle to the Super Rugby team is disruptive: “The challenge we face in this competition is that the team constantly changes to the needs of the Super Rugby side.”

If it is tough to buy that, consider that last year Ricardo Loubscher, while he was head coach of the Sharks XV, once joked that the Super Rugby calls are made so late that sometimes they pick their teams on the flights to the Rugby Challenge games, their lineouts worked on in the aisle...