Ken Borland

The Bulls are still in search of the perfect game as they enter the business end of the United Rugby Championship, with coach Jake White saying how they complete the last three weeks of round-robin action will define their campaign.

While their opponents on Saturday at Loftus Versfeld, Benetton Treviso, are almost 100% likely to miss out on the playoffs according to the StatMaster possibilities released by the URC on Friday, the importance of the game for the Bulls is shown by the prediction that, if they win, they will be 95% certain of a place in the top eight, while defeat will see their odds plummet from 83% currently to just 60%.

And with a match against the third-placed Glasgow Warriors and then a visit to Ospreys to follow, the Bulls probably can’t afford to let a win slip on Saturday.

“It’s tough for everybody at the back end of the competition,” White said, “in the next three weeks the whole competition can turn on its head. It’s three big games for everyone and then hopefully three more to win the tournament.

“So we are taking nothing for granted, there is still a lot of rugby to be played. You want to be playing your best rugby at the back end of the competition, that’s the way you want to progress, not play your best rugby in the beginning and not make the playoffs.

“We are not where we want to be yet, but against Benetton I want to see continued improvement.

“If we do that then we still control our own destiny in terms of where we end up. We’ve been playing well and we want to build on that,” White said.

The Bulls do not quite have a 100% bill of good health for the game, with powerful inside centre Harold Vorster having tested positive for Covid, but moving to 12 should be water off a duck’s back for Cornal Hendricks, given how he flourished in the position when White moved him there in 2020.

Apart from his attacking prowess, the former Springbok wing is quite happy to get stuck in in defence, never leaving the field with lilywhite shorts.

“Cornal has shown he is very capable of playing inside centre, he was the talk of the town there when Harold arrived at Loftus,” White pointed out. “He can be direct, he’s big and strong.

“The combination with Chris Smith at flyhalf has had lots of game-time and done well. Cornal brings different strengths to Harold and that might be the style we want to play … ”

Although there is a chance of rain on Saturday, it is not going to be the sort of tropical storms that batter Kings Park and White expects altitude to be a worry for the Italians, whatever the weather.

“I’ve heard the weather won’t be that great, but it’s not as if there’s going to be hail or blistering winds. It’s still at high altitude at 2pm, and that will be different to what Benetton are used to.

“We want to play quickly and use the altitude as an advantage, get our tempo and attack going. When we get the ball we want to hang on to it and show our confidence,” White said.

Bulls – Kurt-Lee Arendse,Canan Moodie,Lionel Mapoe,Cornal Hendricks,Madosh Tambwe,Chris Smith,Embrose Papier,Elrigh Louw,Cyle Brink,Marcell Coetzee (CAPT),Ruan Nortje,Walt Steenkamp,Mornay Smith,Johan Grobbelaar,Gerhard Steenekamp. IMPACT:Jan-Hendrik Wessels,Simphiwe Matanzima,Dylan Smith,Janko Swanepoel,Arno Botha,Zak Burger,Morne Steyn,Stedman Gans.

One thing that has become clear in this year’s Carling Currie Cup is that the ‘smaller’ unions, those not playing in Europe, cannot be taken for granted and the belief and hunger now flowing through the veins of the Griquas and Pumas players is going to make them hard to stop in the last three weeks of competition.

Griquas are third on the log and the Pumas fourth, with just the Sharks and Bulls ahead of them. At least one of them is going to make the semi-finals as they play each other in Kimberley on Saturday, but they will both go through if Western Province fail to beat the Sharks in Durban.

For the Pumas, the success of their season has been based on the realisation that they cannot just rely on their forwards to grind opponents down and they have produced some fine attacking rugby with ball-in-hand too.

“Our forwards were our go-to and they are still one of our strong points. But we said that we must play balanced rugby, we can’t just rely on our forwards for 80 minutes. The engine must rest a bit as well! So we have spread the workload, we are also using the kicking game more and overall we are just playing with more ball.

“When we played in SuperRugby Unlocked last year we got exposed to playing against the very best guys, Springboks included. We saw that we can beat them, but we just needed to rectify the small mistakes that were costing us. We spent two months focusing on that in pre-season and now we are starting to really get belief that we can beat the big unions,” ever-dangerous Pumas fullback Devon Williams told The Citizen on Wednesday.

Griquas wing Daniel Kasande also said there was a link between last year’s experiences and all the narrow defeats they suffered and their strong showing in this year’s Currie Cup.

“Not much has changed in terms of our system and structure from last year, but we had a lot of narrow losses then, things would just not go for us at the end of matcheis. So since then we have been fine-tuning our play and getting in sync with each other. Being together now for two seasons, you can see the chemistry in how we play.

“Before, every time we went into a competition we were the new boys and you get a bit of cold feet. But once you are in with the big boys for a while, you grow in confidence. You start to feel that you can dominate and it was very special beating Western Province at Newlands, once you do that sort of thing once, you believe you can do it again and again,” Kasande told The Citizen.

The way Griquas and the Pumas have contributed to the competition, one hopes many of their players are voted into the team for the newly-created Carling Champions Match – an all-star Currie Cup team chosen by the public – on November 6.

Following the awful disappointments of 2016, what a sheer delight the last three weeks of Springbok rugby have been, culminating in the series whitewash over France in front of more than 55 000 people at Ellis Park, as well as a wonderful game the night before at Orlando Stadium between the SA A and French Barbarians sides.

Apart from the winning, up-tempo rugby played by both the Springboks and their second-stringers, the other similarity between the two teams is that both clearly enjoy a wonderful team culture.

It cannot be understated how important a role a good team environment will play in the success of a side and we saw last year how the Proteas cricket team drastically improved their results after a “culture camp”.

At the top level, teams are very similar in terms of physicality, conditioning and skill, so the crucial extra 1% that gives sides the edge is often found on the mental side of sport – happy players committed to a cause or a “brotherhood”, to use the in-vogue expression, will give more out on the field.

Sure, Brendan Venter and Franco Smith have come along and brought considerable technical expertise to the Springboks, but I have never, in 25 years of covering South African rugby, seen a squad speak more about just how happy they were to be together and how much they loved the environment than the current group under Allister Coetzee and his fellow coaches. The captaincy of Warren Whiteley must also be mentioned because there’s no doubt he has played a big role in the team culture as well.

It is a similar culture, borne from adversity, that is seen in Whiteley’s Lions team and it is also evident in the SA A side under Johan Ackermann. It was clearly displayed at the end of the game against the French Barbarians in Orlando when scrumhalf Jano Vermaak was spontaneously, just for the sheer joy of it, lifted on to the shoulders of his team-mates after kicking the last conversion, and when the whole squad sang stirring songs together, bobbing in a tight embrace, after the trophy presentation.

The fact that Ackermann has managed to create that culture in the SA A side in just a few weeks is testament to what a fine coach he is and hopefully he will be back in South Africa soon after increasing his experience and knowledge with Gloucester in the United Kingdom.

Ackermann, a former Springbok lock, first made his name as a coach through his technical and tactical acumen in the set-pieces, but he also has the ability to inspire a team, a crucial man-management skill in any coach.

Singing along with the SA A team were a bunch of supporters in the far grandstand and I believe playing top rugby in Soweto has a great future. The SA A game was played at 8pm on a Friday night the day before a Test at Ellis Park, so the crowd was always going to be small.

But I know it is in SA Rugby’s future plan to play more games in Soweto, and to stage them at 3pm in the afternoon and not during a Test week in the same city. There’s no doubt we will then see the crowds pouring in, because there is a great love for the game in Soweto, but access remains a problem.

Orlando Stadium is also a magnificent venue, modern, spacious and with one of the best views of the field, from any vantage point, you will see.  The fact that top rugby did not return earlier to Orlando after the memorable 2010 Super Rugby final that inspired such goodwill is a great pity.

https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/the-citizen-kzn/20170701/282321090023086