Ken Borland

Their troubles overseas may have caused a slight fissure in the Bulls’ confidence and coach Jake White said on Wednesday that their crunch United Rugby Championship match against the Sharks in Durban on Friday night will be a real examination of how good the Currie Cup champions really are away from home.

The Bulls have been well-nigh unbeatable at Loftus Versfeld, but they won just one of their four URC matches in the UK and they were beaten by the Sharks in their last visit to Kings Park, in the Currie Cup in August. White is also expecting the Sharks to field many of their nine current Springboks.

“It’s going to be almost like playing an international team with nine Springboks, a Scottish international in Dylan Richardson, and Samoan (OJ Noa) and Australian (Ben Tapuai) Test players,” White said on Wednesday.

“So it’s a massive game for us against the strongest possible Sharks team, and it’s away from home. It’s not just another local derby because it comes on the back of two Currie Cup finals we won against them.

“It’s going to be a massive test of whether we are good enough to win away from home against a star-studded team, a great opportunity to see how good we are. This one is different, it has added spice.

“So the buzz at training this week has been a little like before a Test match and that comes on its own before a massive challenge. Everyone wants to have a crack at those players,” White said.

While White gave his players three weeks off upon their return from Britain because the mental stress of playing so much rugby in Covid bubbles was beginning to tell, he said they have been hard at work since then rectifying some of the areas in which they were exposed on their tour.

“We learnt a lot on tour with different players coming up against you. We thought we were in a good place after the Currie Cup only to find things that really needed to be looked at in our game.

“The breakdown was one, both attacking and in defence, and in terms of attack, we need to develop as a team, we can’t stay in the same groove, we need to work on how we want to use the players in our team.

“The athletic ability of all the players overseas was an eye-opener, their footwork and handling skills. You think you have them cornered and then their skills get them out of the hole.

“The body shapes and abilities of the players overseas was a bit different to what we’re used to and the refereeing was different too – subtleties in defence and attack that would probably be blown here,” White said.

The Bulls have lost the services of Springbok mainstay Trevor Nyakane but probably have five million reasons to be happy to let him go, with coach Jake White saying on Wednesday that he was “comfortable” with the versatile prop’s move.

The 32-year-old Nyakane, who played in 12 of the Springboks’ 13 Tests this year, has signed with French club Racing 92, and will begin his three-year deal in Paris before the end of the month. Nyakane had two more years to run on his Bulls contract, however, and the Pretoria franchise will reportedly receive R5 million from one of the leading clubs in Europe in compensation.

“Trevor is no longer with us, although we were going to give him time off until January anyway,” White said on Wednesday. “He was never going to stay with us forever and post the 2023 World Cup, I didn’t see him playing domestically anyway.

“It was always highly likely that he was going overseas and we haven’t had him for six months anyway, plus we were likely to not have him for big chunks of next year.

“He’s been fantastic for the Bulls and is a great team man, but in terms of return on investment, sometimes it’s the right time to release a player.

“We’re very comfortable letting him go and we are busy planning to get one or two other tightheads in our squad. It’s not ideal losing players overseas, but you don’t want to be paying big money for players if you never see them,” White said.

The former Springbok coach also suggested that the national team might have to go back to their previous policy of having zero overseas-based players in their line-up, in order to protect franchise rugby at home.

“It raises the question whether the policy of picking overseas players for the Springboks is going to last forever? Because long-term that policy is to the detriment of the franchises and that’s a fact,” White said.

“For me, the Irish and Kiwi model, where only home-based players are picked for the national team, works and they have been successful with it. Australia have the Matt Giteau rule allowing more experienced players from overseas to play for the Wallabies.

“At the moment I’m not sure the franchises get a return on investment because you have so many players unavailable for long periods and we have a salary cap. But we are not as affected as the Stormers or Sharks,” White said.

Johan Grobbelaar is not exactly a seasoned hooker at just 23 years old, but he is a Springbok tourist now and is looking forward to his new-found experience rubbing off on the young pups at the Bulls who have had to hold the fort in the United Rugby Championship.

With the international season now over, national call-ups will no longer be a factor, although it is likely someone like Trevor Nyakane will be having a few weeks’ rest before joining the URC fray. But the Bulls should be strengthened for their match against the Sharks in Durban on Friday night by the return of Grobbelaar.

The Paarl Gym product did not make it on to the field for the Springboks, but the experience gained from just being in the set-up for the Rugby Championship in Australia will have made him an even better player.

“The thing about the Bulls is that the knowledge is passed from player to player, maybe that’s why people say Loftus is a locks factory and now it seems to be a bit of a hooker factory too,” Grobbelaar says.

“We have good hookers here now and we are putting pressure on each other as well as helping one another.

“Being with the Springboks was a very good experience, I was surprised and excited to be called up and it was very nice to see how the system works. But now I’m looking forward to playing with the Bulls and getting some game time after a long time off the field.

“The lessons I can pass on are about how small the margins are because there were three Tests we could have won, and how to vasbyt and keep your composure at the end,” Grobbelaar, whose last on-field action came on July 30 in a Currie Cup match against Western Province, said.

No-one would expect Ox Nche, Siya Kolisi, Lukhanyo Am, Makazole Mapimpi or Bongi Mbonambi to turn out for the Sharks following their heroics with the Springboks, but the KwaZulu-Natal outfit could well be boosted by the inclusion of prop Thomas du Toit, scrumhalf Grant Williams and outside backs Aphelele Fassi and Sbu Nkosi, all of whom saw no action in Europe.

So Rassie Erasmus and SA Rugby have apologised and accepted their punishments from that perfidious body known as WorldRugby, but what will be done about all the officiating errata that has marred the game this year?

Most probably nothing because the northern hemisphere bloc that now enjoys the hegemony at WorldRugby will be too busy power-mongering and money-chasing to pay much notice to the real problems the game is facing. Rugby pundits around the world have been writing about the need to bring clarity and uniformity to the way the game is officiated for more than a decade now, and all WorldRugby seems to do is print new and even more confusing law interpretations.

The sport itself is losing credibility because fans no longer understand the laws or how they are blown. Frustrated, they end up casting aspersions on the integrity of the poor referees. It is a dangerous place for any sport to be when you are alienating your own supporters.

While Erasmus’s hour-long video was perhaps a bit too much like starting a riot for WorldRugby’s authoritarian tastes, a rant was inevitable following British and Irish Lions coach Warren Gatland being able to get away with questioning the integrity of South African Marius Jonker when he was appointed TMO shortly before the first Test due to Covid restrictions that stopped Brendan Pickerill from travelling from New Zealand.

Predictably, the 50/50 calls went the Lions’ way, but Erasmus was more upset with the poor refereeing of Australian Nic Berry.

But it’s not just Erasmus who has lashed out at officials this year. Wallabies coach Dave Rennie was publicly furious over how his team were treated by the officials on their European tour and rugby fans in South Africa were eagerly awaiting news of what action would be taken against him, especially since Jonker was the target of his rage, even though on a couple of key decisions he was left trying to find compelling evidence to overturn the referee’s on-field decision.

WorldRugby ended up just issuing Rennie a written warning on Friday.

Losing teams are always going to have one or two gripes to complain about, and generally the side that wins would have had a couple of decisions go against them too. But the mathematics of the recent officiating seems to have swung well away from 50/50.

Things are not adding up too often for WorldRugby to continue to turn a blind eye to this crisis.

Speaking about adding up, England conceded 11 second-half penalties against the Springboks last weekend as the pressure mounted on them, but there were no team warnings, no yellow cards. The great Nigel Owens stated in his column in the Telegraph that he felt South Africa were especially unfortunate not to get more reward out of their dominant scrum.

But the Springboks obviously don’t want to dare say anything critical and just add to the bans and fines WorldRugby are launching their way.

We can only hope that as one of their New Year’s Resolutions, WorldRugby can find it in their hearts to sort out the officiating crisis and placate the bee’s nest that has been stirred up this year. Of course referees will err and no-one wants to see them put under undue pressure.

But when the governing body turns a blind eye to accountability across the board, then it puts the high-stakes international game, made even more tense by bubble life, under untenable strain.