Ken Borland

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The Cell C Sharks will play an attacking brand of rugby in next year’s SuperRugby competition because the strength of their squad demands it, new director of rugby Gary Gold told The Citizen yesterday.

Gold will continue the Sharks’ elusive search for a maiden SuperRugby title after one season under Jake White that saw them lose in the semi-finals but also alienate many supporters with a conservative game plan.

The former Springbok assistant coach says, with the talent at their disposal, the Sharks will simply have to be more ambitious. Gold inherits a mighty pack featuring half-a-dozen Springboks and an exciting backline bursting with playmakers like Cobus Reinach, Pat Lambie, Odwa Ndungane, JP Pietersen and Lwazi Mvovo.

“One of the characteristics of a winning team is that they score tries and we’re not going to beat New Zealand teams 9-6 with three penalties, so we have to score tries. It’s easier said than done and I’m not a rugby romantic, but the Sharks are lucky to have a great squad of players so we can aspire to a brand of rugby that means scoring tries.

“We’ll still look to play in the right areas of the field, there will be a level of pragmatism, but our starting point is that we’re going to put a lot of time and energy into our attack so we can score tries. You have to tailor-make your game-plan to the players at your disposal, but with this great squad we simply have to embrace more attacking skill,” Gold said.

Gold, who was appointed by the Sharks two weeks ago, said all the pre-season planning for SuperRugby was in place, with the squad training from November 17-December 17 and then gathering together again on January 5. While the experienced Currie Cup, Premiership and Japanese league coach is inheriting a star-studded squad, he said he will be looking to make small-scale changes.

“There won’t be much recruitment, but there are two or three positions we’ve identified where we need more strength in depth, which will be important when you consider the demands of the competition. Another of the reasons champion teams are successful is that the difference between their first-choice and second-choice player in any position is not so big that it makes a difference to the performance of the team,” Gold said.

The 47-year-old is also a proponent of a rotation policy, which should avoid the burnout that seemed to afflict the Sharks towards the end of this year’s SuperRugby campaign.

“Another characteristic of successful SuperRugby and Premiership sides is that they embrace a rotation policy. A first-choice player can start for three weeks and then you can give him three days off because he knows he’ll be coming off the bench for 30 minutes the next weekend. He knows he’s still the number one in his position but he’ll appreciate the break and will be a better performer when he comes back because of it. I’m personally not a big believer in playing people into the ground,” Gold said.

The new director of rugby confirmed that the three coaches who guided the Sharks through the Currie Cup – Brad Macleod-Henderson, Sean Everitt and Paul Anthony – would serve as his assistants before taking the reins again for next year’s Currie Cup.

With Brendan Venter on board as a consultant and plans to bring an overseas attack consultant to Durban for a short while later this year, Gold is keen on getting different ideas into the system.

“As the director of rugby, it’s very difficult to coach and deal with recruitment, agents or budgets towards the end of the year and I also want to support the junior team coaches. Hopefully I’ll get a really good working relationship going with Brad, Sean and Paul in SuperRugby and I want us to get together with all the coaches, as a group, and shoot the breeze or share ideas. The U19 coach might have ideas that will work with the senior team … ” Gold said.

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Glendower Golf Club, the classic parklands layout in Edenvale, will host the South African Open for the second successive time, from January 8-11 next year, the Sunshine Tour announced yesterday.

It will be the fifth time overall that the 6899m course will host the world’s second oldest national open, following last year’s event won by Morten Orum Madsen, and the 1997 (Vijay Singh), 1993 (Clinton Whitelaw) and 1989 (Fred Wadsworth) tournaments.

The 104^th edition of the South African Open will be the first since 2010 for which the Sunshine Tour will hold the commercial rights, which is one of the reasons the tournament has moved from November to January, which will hopefully make it easier for the country’s top stars to participate.

The SA Open will now fill the spot in the calendar that had been taken by the winners-only Volvo Golf Champions, staged in Durban over the last two years.

“We are delighted that we can announce that the City of Ekurhuleni will remain on board as the host sponsor for the 104th SA Open and we thank the mayor, Cllr Mondli Gungubele, and his executive for their massive support of the SA Open and professional golf in South Africa. We are also very pleased to be able to return to the magnificent Glendower Golf Club for the second consecutive year,” Selwyn Nathan, the executive director of the Sunshine Tour, said yesterday.

“We are honoured to once again be the host city of the prestigious South African Open Championship and look forward to welcoming some of the very best golfers in the world to our aerotropolis. We are very proud to be involved with an event of this stature. For the past three years that we have been involved with the SA Open it has given our city such important exposure to so many decision-makers around the world – something that augurs well for our efforts to bring in investors from all over the world,” Gungubele said.

Marquee names for the tournament will be announced soon, according to the Sunshine Tour, and there are also plans afoot to ensure South Africa’s leading golfers play regularly in the South African Open.

South Africa’s movement towards becoming a complete team ahead of next year’s World Cup was halted in Pretoria on Saturday, with atrocious conditions throwing up an unexpected stumbling block which saw their pack exposed by Argentina.

In the end, the Springboks scraped home 13-6 in their opening Rugby Championship fixture, but they spent the final minutes desperately defending their line as Argentina went after a late goal to level the scores.

Torrential rain and hail began falling during the anthems and kept up for the first half. Although conditions eased after the break, there was still steady rain throughout and the pitch was sodden. So there was no chance of the expansive style of play the Springboks are trying to develop, and they even struggled to get their more typical forward-dominated driving game going as the Pumas pack presented a brick wall of defiance.

Springbok captain Jean de Villiers, who has grown up in Cape Town, where winter storms blowing up from the Antarctic are common, described the conditions as “probably the worst I have ever played in”.

“The ball was so wet and so difficult to handle, you couldn’t play at all,” he said, before describing a comical situation in which Pumas flyhalf Nicolas Sanchez tried to kick off, but the ball refused to bounce up off the waterlogged surface.

“The All Blacks kick more and we now run the ball more, we wanted to play exciting rugby today, but we have to be able to play this sort of game as well. There will be more games like this, especially at the World Cup, and I’m not totally happy that we didn’t get a better platform up front,” coach Heyneke Meyer said.

“But even an arm-wrestle was difficult in these conditions, it was so wet that you just couldn’t get going. The rain made it a 50/50 game and 70% of Argentina’s team play in Europe and are more used to conditions like that. They have big, strong forwards and they like a slower game, because their tactics are more about contesting for the ball than continuity.”

The Pumas, despite their epic performance, were sad after the game because they saw it as a missed opportunity to register their first ever win over South Africa.

“We have had very few opportunities to win against the Springboks and we think that was one that we let pass. South Africa have a very good line-up and it’s maybe only today that they did not have their top game. So we are not happy, today was an opportunity to beat them,” Argentina coach Daniel Hourcade said.

The Pumas successfully dominated the Springboks in both the scrums and lineouts to deny them any solid first-phase ball, but referee John Lacey often penalised them at the scrums to give the under-pressure home side a reprieve.

“We complicated their lineout and we’ve worked very hard on our scrum and I think you could see that on the pitch. We consider that we were very good at the scrums, but we were penalised,” captain Agustin Creevy said with more than a hint of frustration.

The late withdrawal of Willem Alberts with a hamstring strain was part of the Springboks’ problems as it meant they were forced to play two openside flanks with Marcell Coetzee coming in for the enforcer in the Springbok pack. The wet ball also meant they focused their lineout throws on the front, where Argentina contested superbly.

Man of the match Francois Louw, the Springbok number six, admitted that his team could have adapted better to the conditions.

“We didn’t execute as well as we should have in the scrums and lineouts. It was a bit loose underfoot for the scrums and lineouts are always difficult in those conditions because you simplify your options and that gives them the chance to effectively compete.

“Those conditions require an immediate mindshift, you’ve got to tighten up and kick more, and our execution of that could have been sharper. We want to continue improving towards the World Cup so that we are on top of our game every time, in any place,” Louw said.