Tempo and tactics to blame for SA wake-up call

A comment from Hurricanes coach John Plumtree when he was asked about what he thought of his team’s progress against the DHL Stormers by the television commentators at the Westpac Stadium may have summed up how little has changed for South African rugby since 1992.

"We need to move their big pack around and if we do that we will be okay," said Plumtree as the Hurricanes started to gain momentum and the Stormers began to look a bit bedraggled as they attempted to contain them.

That was in the middle stages of the first half when the Hurricanes were starting to win ball and the Stormers’ defence was being stretched. It was almost as if every time the Hurricanes had the ball the Stormers just weren’t there. At that point, with the Hurricanes opening a 15-6 lead, it looked like it might be one of those long and humiliating nights for the Stormers such as they experienced on tour over the last two seasons.

That it didn’t turn out that way was because the pack that Plumtree wanted to move around by speeding up play made a strong statement in first phase and with their driving mauls. The Stormers also sorted out their overall defensive effort after halftime, with some good line-speed being injected.

INDIVIDUAL ERRORS

They were let down though in that department by individual errors. It is doubtful that Stormers wing SP Marais will be wanting to watch the video of his attempts to prevent Hurricanes wing Wes Goosen scoring the brace of tries that effectively won it for the hosts. There was a similar moment in the Sharks game against the Rebels, with Aphelele Fassi being the culprit there.

This is mentioned because the standard response from some South African coaches both in victory and defeat is to either let the team’s aggression and physicality take the credit if they win, or to take the blame if they lose.

Vodacom Bulls coach Pote Human was at it after his team’s humiliating defeat to the Chiefs in Pretoria. He felt his team weren’t physical enough. He was wrong. His team just weren’t allowed to place their usual physical stamp on the game because, like the Plumtree comment appeared to telegraph earlier in the day, the Bulls were skinned by the tempo that the Chiefs brought to the game.

If you apply a bit of thought to it, and look at how the Bulls had fared before the Chiefs game and which matches they had lost and won, the defeat perhaps shouldn’t have been as unexpected as it was. Maybe the margin, but not the loss, for everything the Bulls have done so far has been achieved in South African derbies.

As the Stormers found out when they huffed and puffed in the middle stages of the first half in Wellington and before their pack reasserted itself and were thus able to bring enough control to slow the game down, there is a significant difference in the pace at which rugby is played in New Zealand in comparison to South Africa.

Plumtree is right, in the sense that while there have been attempts to upskill South African players and quicken up the local game, there is still a lag.

The best chance of a South African team winning still appears to be to slow the game down - although significantly not on the Highveld, where the Lions and Bulls have outlasted overseas opposition down the years and where a quick game, as was the case in the Lions’ semifinal win against the Hurricanes in 2017 and possibly as recently as last week’s game against the Rebels. This brings the altitude factor more into play.

It was very much a case of South African brawn and physicality against Kiwi efficiency and skill when this country first returned from isolation to resume battle with their fiercest rivals, and on the evidence of this past weekend, nothing has really changed. The New Zealanders are still looking to move the South African packs around as their starting point, and it’s often when they get duped into indulging in a testosterone battle that it goes awry for them.

TACTICAL FAILURE

Not that it was only tempo that sunk the Bulls. There was also a tactical reason why they lost. They had a new fullback, and later in the game they had two wingers who have played much of their top rugby on the sevens circuit.

Rosko Specman has played well since swopping the Blitzbok jersey for the Bulls’ light blue, but he still has a lot to learn about the conventional code. When the Bulls are asked to defend in their own half, which they were at the weekend, that becomes a problem.

Indeed, that takes us back to the earlier statement asking readers to think about which games the Bulls have won and which they have lost.

It was a different game because it was played in wet weather, but the Bulls were every bit as abjectly poor in Buenos Aires in the second round as they were against the Chiefs. Excuse the pun, but they looked like fish out of water there because of the areas of the field where the game was played.

For all the culture change that has been evident at Loftus in the past few years, there are some basic tenets of their game that remain the same. They need to dictate territory and from that dictate the scoreboard.

There were some watching the game at Loftus or on television who probably held out hopes of a great Bulls comeback, like the one the Lions achieved against the Rebels the week before, but that was never going to happen. How often do the Bulls come from behind to win a game? If it’s happened it hasn’t happened often.

NOT JUST KIWI TEAMS LOOK TO SPEED IT UP

In that sense they are a bit like the Sharks, who put a massive effort into gaining early physical ascendancy against the Rebels at King’s Park. Incidentally, although they are not a Kiwi team, the Australians employed the same modus operandi - it was very noticeable to those at the Durban game how determined the Rebels were to speed the game up.

This was evident not just in the style of play employed, but in the time taken between lineouts, something which unfortunately, because of all the TMO and other interruptions in modern rugby, is not often in the players’ hands.

Sharks coach Robert du Preez blamed a lack of physicality and aggression for the successive defeats to the Stormers and the Bulls, so it was quite predictable that he should mention physical dominance as one of the primary factors in his team’s turn-around.

TOO MANY EGGS IN ONE BASKET

Of course the obvious question that follows is that if physical dominance is such an imperative, what happens on the day when the Sharks are fronted?

We got that answer in their games against the Stormers and Sharks, and frankly, while the Sharks’ determination did get them the result against the Rebels, you have to wonder if the Sharks have the material, in the second row in particular, to really bank everything on forward control.

The Sharks may well have an upswing in fortunes when both Ruan Botha and Jean-Luc du Preez are fit again. But they may be making a mistake if, as appears to be the case, they bank everything on physically beating up their opponents and don’t continue the early season work on the attacking dynamic that was supposedly going to be introduced by new attack coach David Williams.

The big winners among the South African teams this past weekend were arguably the Emirates Lions, in the sense that it would have been with a sense of foreboding that they travelled to Singapore. A 13-point win was a good return for them, even though they also did it the old fashioned South African way, which was to select big ball carriers to grind it out.

WEEKEND RESULTS

Blues 33 Highlanders 26

Hurricanes 34 DHL Stormers 28

Waratahs 20 Crusaders 12

Sunwolves 24 Emirates Lions 37

Vodacom Bulls 20 Chiefs 56

Cell C Sharks 28 Rebels 14

Reds 36 Brumbies 14