“If I had to listen to you guys, I’d think I have to go to the top of a building and jump off.
A clearly irritated Vodacom Bulls coach Jake White defended his team after their second consecutive poor display on tour in the Vodacom United Rugby Championship on Saturday as they went down 31-17 to Munster in Limerick.
White went to great lengths to defend his side, talk about their inexperience against “a side filled with internationals” and continued his mantra that the team was on a learning path.
“It’s not the end of the world, Munster are a good team, and they have a lot of good internationals. We need to be in the competition fighting at the back of it,” White said.
And in a way he is right. The URC is not a sprint but a marathon and as the Bulls showed last season they could start badly and still make it to the final.
But the concerns won’t go away for White’s side as their continued inability – bar the superb win in Dublin in the semifinal last season – to win away from home in Europe.
Things don’t get easier this week when they face Benetton, a side that has given them nightmares before. The Italians shocked the Bulls in the final of the Rainbow Cup and while they took 50 in Edinburgh on Saturday, they are unbeaten at home this season and filled with internationals.
That makes the task more difficult but won’t lessen the expectation that the Bulls have created for themselves.
They will know, more than anyone, that you can’t survive just on home wins at Loftus Versfeld. Last season they snuck a few away wins in Europe, but the likelihood is that even this will be tougher this season.
So the real worry is that this Bulls side has been a shadow of themselves in the opening five rounds of the competition. While there was a good win over Connacht and a predicted away win against the Lions, against Edinburgh they snuck home by the skin of their teeth.
And on tour, they have looked lethargic, out of touch and unable to cope with referee decisions and conditions that have hardly suited their game.
The pressure that the opposition have put on them has seen them fold early, then try and play catch-up late in the game.
White is correct that it isn’t a train smash yet, and the side will learn from these experiences. But that will come as little comfort to their fans, who eye a bigger European campaign ahead and if this is what the Bulls dish out in conditions that don’t suit them, they have a right to be concerned.
The Bulls’ supporters can only judge on what they see on the field, and to be honest, the lapse in the Bulls’ own standards in the past two weeks has been poor.
And while White can correctly talk about a young side that is learning, the concern goes further because in a month or two they will lose their inspirational captain Marcell Coetzee, and impressive lock Walt Steenkamp to Japan.
While they do have replacements and ultimately they will be a lot tougher on home soil, the Bulls’ headache of failing to produce away from home is hardly something new. The side, from their Super Rugby days, are perennial poor travellers and it has hampered more than one campaign.
So while the odd poor performance is expected, the manner in which the Bulls lost in the past two weeks has been the most disappointing. On both occasions, if the opposition game was a little more on song, they would have taken big margins, and on both occasions a late fightback made it look a lot more palatable.
And it won’t get any easier for the Bulls going forward, so they will need to find a way to win in a competition that gives you second or even third chances.
Benetton will be a tough nut to crack, and while the Bulls will still be able to recover if they suffer a third loss in a row, it will do nothing to stop their reputation as poor travellers. Until they consistently are able to put in quality performances away from home to the standards they set themselves, there will be disappointment.
And only they can change that.