Ken Borland

The flyhalves – Chris Smith v Lionel Cronje

Currie Cup finals are seldom pretty affairs and both Smith and Cronje will probably have to put away many of the slick attacking tricks we know they are both capable of pulling out of the hat. Game-management is going to be their key role on Saturday and much of that depends on the platform given to them by their forwards. So kicking could wll be their key skill: Smith showed his mettle by slotting a 79^th-minute penalty to level the scores in last season’s final and he has also come out tops in other high-pressure situations at home. The 32-year-old Cronje has the experience though to know how to vary his play and, having played for both Verblitz and the Brumbies under Jake White, he has insight into the Bulls’ game-plan.

The Bulls loose-trio v the Sharks attackers

The Sharks do like to play a bit of running rugby and Elrigh Louw, Arno Botha and Marcell Coetzee will be like a hit squad lining up to crunch those visitors looking to provide some attacking spark. They love defence so much one can imagine them shouting “My Kill” to each other on the field. The Sharks are effective though in offloading and playing in the wide channels, and they have potent counter-attackers in Thaakir Abrahams, Curwin Bosch and Yaw Penxe. The Bulls are expected to boss the battles at close quarters, while the Sharks will have an edge in pace as the ball goes wider or play gets looser.

Thomas du Toit v Gerhard Steenekamp

The return of the Springbok tighthead will no doubt make a telling difference to the Sharks scrum, as there has been no consistency in that set-piece for them this season. And that’s not to mention the big hits the mobile 26-year-old makes around the field. Du Toit and lock Gerbrandt Grobler bring a lot of experience to a youthful tight five and the World Cup winner will also bring confidence having been one of the standout performers in the Springboks’ victory in the second Test against Argentina.

Du Toit will obviously not have it easy though against Steenekamp, who has been one of the finds of the season for the Bulls, a strong man both in the scrums and the tight exchanges.

Having attended a private school in the Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal, I’m as used to the accusations of my alma mater being stuck-up as I am to the reality that in national terms, we are pretty low down the pecking order in terms of schoolboy rugby.

Barring the odd golden periods, the private schools generally struggle to compete with the likes of your Grey College, Paul Roos, Paarl Gym, Affies and Paarl Boys’ High. But where their contribution is proportionally greater is in providing Black players for the pipeline.

And perhaps this is one of the key reasons a thriving schoolboy scene does not translate into greater success for our Junior Springboks side. There has been a lot of angst expressed in the last week over their performances on their tour of the United Kingdom – they were hammered by England and could only snatch a last-minute win over Wales.

The displays did not engender much confidence that South Africa can compete for the honours in the World Rugby U20 Championship that starts in Argentina early next month. It’s a tournament which the Junior Springboks have not won since 2012 and they have not appeared in the final since 2014.

It’s not as if they’re finishing at the bottom of the log either, though, with South Africa having finished third three times in the last four years and fourth once. But given the widely-held belief that we have the strongest schools rugby system in the world, there’s the lingering feeling that we should be doing better.

The problem is the advantages our schoolboy behemoths have in terms of strength, power and pace don’t last through into the senior ranks. Winning at all costs in the highly competitive schools scene means physical characteristics are relied upon and developed, to the detriment of skills. At senior professional level, everyone is pretty much on a par physically thanks to the scientific advances in conditioning, and South Africa loses its advantage.

This mentality also means South Africa’s great rugby schools have been ignoring their responsibility towards the pipeline of our rugby through their reluctance to embrace the need to develop more Black talent. It is time those top-10 schools become more transformed in their recruitment and in the teams they put out on to the field week in, week out.

Quotas or targets have been in place in our national teams for a long time now, and our top rugby schools really need to get with the program. That’s if they really have the national interest at heart and are truly preparing their pupils for the real South Africa outside their secluded cloisters.

Most of the Black players in the Junior Springboks system come from private schools, but I would love to see those great establishments mentioned above push more previously disadvantaged players through their outstanding rugby systems, which can only see better players being produced. I am pleased to hear that Grey College are planning big changes in this regard.

Quotas are obviously controversial and are not a perfect tool. Personally I don’t like them, but I liken them to elephant culling.

Elephants are my favourite animal and I cannot stand the thought of them being killed. But I also recognise the need for culling because if their populations in game reserves are left unchecked, elephants destroy their environment leading to the deaths of both themselves and many other creatures.

The fact that elephants are confined to game reserves is a man-made problem, therefore man has the responsibility to find a solution. Likewise, Apartheid was a man-made problem and quotas seem to be the best solution on the table right now to undo the damage.

Given how long we have waited for the Springboks to comprise just 50% players of colour, I shudder to think what would have happened if quotas were not in force.

https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/the-citizen-gauteng/20190504/282467120320394

The Springboks, having won impressively last weekend in Port Elizabeth, will now travel to Salta to play Argentina on Saturday and my recollection of this north-western city is that it was blindingly hot and at altitude.

We were there in 2014 and we won right at the back end of the game in temperatures greater than 30⁰ and at more than a thousand metres above sea-level. The heat was the main thing and at kick-off it was still really hot and the guys took time to get into their stride.

But the Springboks have had a nice recovery since Port Elizabeth and are using the best travel plan, I think it works having had experience of that when we won in Argentina in 2015. With this way of travel, you basically keep the players on South African time and it really helps them.

They have had two good days of prep this week and Salta is quite remote, being nearly 1500 kilometres from Buenos Aires, and it involves a lot of flying, probably three flights, to get there, including one of about three hours from the capital.

They would have spent the whole of Wednesday flying, but it’s obviously in business class so they can sleep and relax. Doing that so close to the game means the players will have better focus on doing the right things to make sure they are 100%, like hydrating or taking sleeping pills. Then once they arrive they can have a stretch and a swim to get their bodies right for the big Test on Saturday. So they will basically arrive, have the captain’s run and play.

The biggest positive with this schedule is that they would have had quality training in Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg, with extra bodies available from the local unions so they could practise 15 versus 15 and put the needed miles into their legs. When you’re travelling, you generally have only 28 players so that isn’t possible.

Last weekend the Springboks just continued in a similar vein to the French series – they had similar energy and enthusiasm and were full of bounce.

The first half was obviously more of a contest, but it laid the platform for the second half because the Springboks really moved the big Argentine forwards around.

What’s really pleasing to me is that they are really developing a good all-round game. They’re scoring four tries per game and only conceding 1.5 per match; you’ll win a lot of Test matches doing that.

It was also significant that both wings scored tries. Courtnall Skosan produced a great finish from an inside ball from a set play, although maybe he was held in the tackle. That needed to be checked by the referee and it is a rule that needs to be looked at as well. Raymond Rhule then scored off a good run off Jesse Kriel.

The real strength of the Springboks, though, was their scrum.

Coenie Oosthuizen has had a rollercoaster ride for the last four years, but he is a really quality player when he is on-song because he brings so much to the game – impact carries, crashingly brutal defence and his work-rate. He is definitely an international-class tighthead and he, Beast Mtawarira and Malcolm Marx were all fantastic. The front row really destroyed the Argentine scrum, which nobody has really done for the last few years. So you have to credit the whole pack and coach Matt Proudfoot.

It is really significant to have the scrum as a weapon of mass destruction because the whole mindset of the tight five in rugby is to go forward. If your props are putting them under pressure in a primary phase then it really affects their whole game and the easy penalty and yardage gains you can get are also a primary priority for teams.

The All Blacks versus Australia game was effectively over as a contest before halftime and it’s really worrying that that happened to a Wallabies team that was ranked fourth before the game and were 54-6 down early in the second half. The All Blacks were obviously keen to send a message to the rest of the world that they are back on track after drawing with the British and Irish Lions.

But the Springboks were also able to get a good win, that lifted them into fourth in the rankings in place of Australia, and now an away bonus point would be like gold, although home bonus points are important too.

Hopefully the Springboks will get another good win in Salta that will set them up for the Australians in Perth.

John McFarland is the assistant coach of the Kubota Spears in Japan and was the Springbok defence coach from 2012 through to the 2015 World Cup, where they conceded the least line-breaks in the tournament and an average of just one try per game. Before that, McFarland won three SuperRugby titles (2007, 09, 10) with the Bulls and five Currie Cup crowns with the Blue Bulls. In all, he won 28 trophies during his 12 years at Loftus Versfeld.

Springbok coach Heyneke Meyer returns to South Africa this morning and will face the press after a disappointing end to their World Cup campaign; my question to him would be “Why do you think you deserve to continue in your post, what progress has been made over the last four years?”

In my opinion, there has been no real progress. There is no meaningful silverware to show, the good results have been cancelled out by some truly awful results, a world ranking of three is nothing to shout about, and, as clearly shown in the dour win over Argentina in the third-place playoff, Meyer cannot even say the game plan has evolved under his watch. And he continues to cause outrage when it comes to transformation – his treatment of Rudi Paige, Lwazi Mvovo and Siya Kolisi showing that he just doesn’t get it when it comes to that vital issue.

Meyer is an honourable man, as passionate as anyone when it comes to Springbok rugby, and he says he wants to be part of the solution that will fix the problems. But in my eyes he is part of the problem; his emotional excesses and fear of losing rub off on the team. The Springboks have not shown the ability to adapt to what is happening on the field, they are too stuck in a rigid game plan.

Watching New Zealand deservedly win the World Cup final clearly showed the direction the Springboks should be going. The All Blacks are peerless when it comes to vision and adaptability on the rugby field and it was surely destiny that Dan Carter would be man of the match in winning the World Cup final.

Meyer seemed to be heading in the right direction in 2013 and 2014 when he tried a more up-tempo, ball-in-hand approach; two epic Tests against the All Blacks resulted and Ellis Park was sold out as she hosted two of the best games of rugby I have witnessed.

But the coach failed to build on those performances, losing his nerve in this World Cup year and retreating back into a conservative, unambitious game plan that was easy to counter. Losing to Japan was bad enough, but the Springboks had the added ignominy of being called “anti-rugby” and being as boring as Argentina were when they first joined the Rugby Championship in 2012.

The fact that his team struggled to beat an Argentina side missing nine first-choice players last weekend rams home that Meyer has not added anything to the Springboks. Replacing him at the helm of a team that clearly needs renewing, especially in terms of strategy, is the only sensible option because Meyer has shown that he cannot take the team forward.

On a positive note, a big high-five to the England Rugby Union for hosting a top-class World Cup. A pleasing feature of the tournament was the improvement shown by the minnows: apart from Japan’s incredible heroics, there were also no massive hidings as rugby showed it is a truly global game.

Even the referees, who are under the harshest lens, stepped up and, barring one or two mishaps, the officiating was of a high standard, helped by a greater reliance on the TMO.