By Gavin Rich.
The Cell C Sharks scored a comprehensive 32-3 win over the Bordeaux Begles at a sweltering HollywoodBets Kings Park on Saturday to maintain their unbeaten record in the Heineken Champions Cup and clinch their place in the final 16 with one pool game to play.
The Durbanites clinched a try-scoring bonus point to take them to 14 points in pool A, one point behind leaders Leinster and, perhaps more significantly, too many points ahead of the eighth-placed team for them to be caught when they travel to London next weekend for their final pool match against Harlequins.
The top eight from each pool go through, so the Sharks become the first South African team to officially make it into the round of 16, and that they would achieve their objective was never in doubt in a game they dominated from start to finish against a Bordeaux team that was a second string combination in several areas.
As has been the case recently, the Sharks won the game through the forwards, although a negative from the game was the early shoulder injury suffered by Springbok hooker Bongi Mbonambi that forced him from the field. While Mbonambi went off during the game, Curwin Bosch was replaced before kick-off by Lionel Cronje due to a slight hamstring strain that the Sharks’ management team felt required management.
The Sharks scored five tries, clinching their bonus point try near the hour mark and then quickly adding another, with both those tries finished off by wing Marnus Potgieter and largely created by some sensational handling from Sharks and Springbok skipper Siya Kolisi, who is in the form of his life and was again a deserved recipient of the man of the match award.
Kolisi was prominent in the early stages, as were the other Bok forwards, and Bordeaux were under pressure from the outset. After Cronje raised the flags to put his team into a 3-0 lead after seven minutes, Springbok scrumhalf Jaden Hendrikse scored a brace of tries, the first coming with a little show and go down the short side off a dominant scrum, and then the second coming by forcing his way over on the right side of the field as the Sharks made full use of a scrum penalty.
Speaking of scrum penalties, that was pretty much the order of the first half, with the visitors being penalised with impunity by referee Luke Pearce for Bordeaux loosehead prop Christopher Voatoa’s inability to stay on his feet when placed under pressure by Sharks tighthead Thomas du Toit.
Almost inevitably, Voatoa ended up in the bin, and the man who scrums alongside him, hooker Clement Maynadier, joined him two minutes later, which meant the French team played much of the last 10 minutes of the first half with 13 men against 15.
Ironically, that period and then immediately after halftime, when they were still a man down, might have been the best part of the game for Bordeaux, who did well not to concede any points in the time they were down by two.
By then though they were already 22-0 down, with lock Gerbrandt Grobler driving over for his team’s third try in the 31st minute to add to Hendrikse’s tries in the 14th and 22nd minute.
Although the nearly 20 000 people who were in the stadium would be pleased with the Sharks win, and what it meant, it wasn’t a great game of rugby with much of it being the scrappy affair you’d expect when rugby is played in Kwa-Zulu/Natal in the height of summer and on a hot and humid day like this one was.
However, the Sharks do deserve credit for the way they tried to speed up play in the early parts of the game, something that appeared to achieve its objective of sapping the energy of visitors who had travelled to the heat from the icy cold of the northern hemisphere winter. Those efforts though might have come back to bite the home team in the middle stages of the game when their play became quite error-ridden and where Bordeaux, to their credit, hung on quite well.
Bordeaux deserve credit for keeping the Sharks to just 10 points in the second half. It looked likely to be much more than that. Although to be fair, it’d be crazy to expect any team to play rollicking side-to-side Barbarians-style rugby successfully in Durban in January.
Just as they did in the first half, Bordeaux lost two players to the bin in the second half, with some of those minutes coinciding. They’d have been pleased to hear the end hooter and then the final whistle.
Scores
Cell C Sharks 32 – Tries: Jaden Hendrikse 2, Gerbrandt Grobler, Marnus Potgieter 2; Conversions: Lionel Cronje 2; Penalty: Lionel Cronje.
Bordeaux-Begles 3 – Penalty: Maxime Lucu.