By Gavin Rich
No-one will pretend there aren’t some much tougher obstacles lying ahead, but this past weekend’s full house of wins confirmed a stunning turnaround for South African teams in the Vodacom United Rugby Championship.
The opening weekend of the competition, when the South African teams and players were so poor that the Irish, Scottish and Welsh commentators were almost patronising, certainly seems a long, long time ago now. Yes, the visiting teams are without their Six Nations players, but the local teams were without their Springboks when they ventured north and that didn’t matter to northern critics in their eagerness to disparage the South African challenge.
Critics like former Wales and British and Irish Lions captain Sam Warburton, who said that the South African teams added no value to the URC, must surely be rethinking their views now. Or maybe they were right – there shouldn’t be any value to any Welsh person to seeing their teams getting outplayed like both the Scarlets and Cardiff were this weekend.
The Scottish teams have yet to venture south, but two Welsh teams have come here and were thoroughly outplayed and the one Irish team that has played here lost both games too.
The first blows forwarding the argument that it is going to be as tough, if not tougher, for teams coming to South Africa as it is for the local teams when they go north, were of course sounded the previous weekend. But a second weekend of positive results, leaving the northern teams winless after eight games and two rounds of competition, provided the confirmation.
Little sign of any learnings being applied
The overseas teams got a taste of the challenges they face in South Africa in that first week. They should have been better the second week after having learned their lessons. Zebre Parma might have been marginally better than they were in Stellenbosch, and Cardiff started much better against the DHL Stormers than they did against the Emirates Lions but yet hardly fired a shot beyond the 15th minute. Generally the results were similar and it wasn’t easy to spot anything that had been learned and applied.
The closest any visiting team has come to winning in South Africa so far is Munster, who lost by two points to the Lions. But we are talking about Munster! And the Lions! That Lions win was a huge one in the context of north versus south, as even when they are not at full strength because of international commitments, Munster are considered one of the best teams in the competition.
And while the win only enabled the Lions to climb to 13th from 15th, and they are still out of contention for either play-off places or a spot in next year’s Champions Cup, it did help their fellow South African teams who are challenging. Fourth placed Munster are now just six and eight points ahead of the Cell C Sharks and the Stormers respectively, and the South African teams have a game in hand.
Why is it important to catch Munster
Why it is important to catch Munster is not just about getting a top four spot that will bring home ground advantage in play-off fixtures, it is also about the mechanics of the competition and Champions Cup qualification. The four Shield winners all get automatic inclusion in the Champions Cup, meaning that the Ospreys, who are currently outside of the top eight, would be there as the top Welsh team.
That means that as it stands, even though the Bulls are eighth and ahead of the Ospreys, they would not be included in the Champions Cup. The spread would be three Irish teams, two Scottish teams, two South African teams and, because they have to be there, the one Welsh team (Ospreys).
The goal for the South African teams, and they are all talking about helping each other, should be to whittle down the number of Irish teams to two, or Scottish teams to one. And that is why the Lions win over Munster had huge significance, and why the Sharks hosting Edinburgh this week will have huge significance too. Knock over fifth placed Edinburgh and the Sharks will lift themselves to fifth and also make Edinburgh’s top eight spot vulnerable.
Coastal teams looking for improvements
The Sharks were probably the least impressive of the South African teams, and both coastal teams will be thinking they need to make improvements before their next games (the Stormers host Ulster). The Stormers won comfortably enough against Cardiff and confirmed just how brilliant they have become at transitioning opposition mistakes into attack opportunities, but by the 55th minute they’d made 13 handling errors and that is just too many.
They are also going to have to sort out their dysfunctioning lineout, and their game at DHL Stadium confirmed the problem they have with hooker depth now that Andre-Hugo Venter is out injured.
But the Stormers have generally been good this year and have exceeded expectations. The same cannot be said of the Sharks even though they have managed four bonus points win in a row and are top of the South African Shield. They probably would not have beaten the Bulls were it not for the unfortunate red card to Morne Steyn and their subsequent games have all been against easy opposition where there have been long periods where they’ve struggled to synchronise on attack.
Once they were completely dominant in the second half against Zebre and were operating only with front foot ball they did put some good attacking plays together, but the backline sweep that featured a good pass from Curwin Bosch that set Werner Kok free down the right flank to set up Grant Willams for the try was still the exception. Mostly the Sharks had to rely on forward drives and in that first half, where they just led 10-6, the Sharks did not provide the attacking fluidity coach Sean Everitt had called for. All they provided was a comedy of errors.
Sharks currently not the team has been hyped
A point that needs to be made about the Sharks though is that much of the high expectation and hype around of that franchise is because of the star players they either have playing for them currently or have contracted going forward.
By the end of their game against Zebre, the team was a long way short of the Springbok incumbent loaded team we are expecting to sweep over every opposition – Ox Nche is injured, Lukhanyo Am is in Japan, Aphelele Fassi left the field injured in the first half as did Thomas du Toit, Makazole Mapimpi was a late withdrawal before kick-off, Sbu Nkosi hasn’t played for two weeks and is joining the Bulls in mid-year.
What the Sharks were left with in terms of current Bok squad members was the former Stormers duo of Siya Kolisi and Bongi Mbonambi and scrumhalf Grant Williams. Everitt will be hoping that both Du Toit and Fassi make quick recoveries from their respective injuries for they will be needed going forward.
Bulls the pick of the SA teams
While the Lions played well for the second successive week, the Bulls were undeniably the most impressive of the local sides and have now picked up the kind of momentum that makes them hard to stop. If the Sharks don’t get their problems sorted out and the Stormers don’t eradicate their error-rate, Jake White’s men could yet be South Africa’s top challenger in the competition, and their rout of Scarlets was a telling response to those of us who questioned the wisdom of playing some player three times in the space of six days. If there was any lack of energy it wasn’t noticeable – the Bulls were at their stomping, snorting best from the opening minutes and sustained that pressure for 80 minutes.
Yes, Altitude definitely matters
White might have confounded sports science with that one, but the theory he has that draws on science, meaning the altitude advantage the highveld teams have, was dramatically underlined at the weekend. Yes, altitude does matter.
Perhaps it wasn’t as clear in the Loftus game, where the Bulls were just so much better than the Scarlets from the outset. It is accepted that altitude is less of a factor in games played at night or in the evening. The Bulls played Munster in the late evening and the Scarlets at night.
The Lions/Munster game though was played in the early afternoon and by the second half, where Munster were unable to continue their momentum of earlier in the game and gave a good impression of fish that are out of water and gasping for air, the impact of altitude was obvious.
Weekend Vodacom United Rugby Championship Results:
Vodacom Bulls 57 Scarlets 12
Glasgow Warriors 30 Edinburgh 17
Emirates Lions 23 Munster 21
Cell C Sharks 38 Zebre Parma 6
DHL Stormers 40 Cardiff 3.