Ken Borland

The Bulls entered European rugby this season like a teenager with acne hesitantly stepping on to the dance floor, but captain Marcell Coetzee will be telling them they will become men when they participate in the Champions Cup later this year.

Despite a poor start to their United Rugby Championship campaign when they were thrown into the deep end and had to play Leinster, Connacht and Edinburgh away from home at the start of the UK winter, the Bulls have secured a quarterfinal place and the Champions Cup qualification that goes with it, with one match to spare.

Coetzee played in the premier European tournament while at Ulster from 2016-2021.

“I hope it doesn’t take as long for us to adapt and my brief to the guys will be that this is when you become men,” Coetzee said on Thursday. “It’s nice for us to have a bite of that cherry and it’s a great format.

“The fans love it and hopefully some will travel here and ours will go to Europe. It’s a very unique, special tournament and you come up against the top French, English and Irish clubs.

“It’s where you can really measure yourself as a team and as an individual. The tournament has such great traditions and it’s like playing international rugby.

“Our game was a bit stop/start when we were just playing domestically, our tempo went down, but we now recognise that there is a lot of tempo and creativity in Europe,” Coetzee said.

The Springbok flank was speaking at the announcement that the second edition of the Carling Black Label Currie Cup Champions Match will take place at the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium on July 2, and, with the Bulls currently top of the Currie Cup log and facing two crucial games over the next fortnight, he said the Loftus Versfeld players are learning to deal with the discomfit of playing in two tournaments at once.

“At the beginning of the season, Jake White [coach] made it abundantly clear that the Bulls want to be competitive in all competitions. We want to win trophies and we all buy into the idea of a one-team union,” Coetzee said.

“For some games, doubling up has been really tough, like when we played Munster the one weekend, the Sharks in midweek and then Scarlets the following weekend.

“But we have good recovery systems in place so we can be competitive on all fronts. The most important thing is that the players are driven to do it from the inside.

“While at Ulster I can remember playing the Pro14 final the one week and Heineken Cup the next week. Your body takes a hammering, but doubling up is possible if the right structures and mental attitudes are in place,” Coetzee said.

Young loose forward Muller Uys returns to the Bulls starting line-up at eighthman for Saturday’s United Rugby Championship match against Edinburgh, and coach Jake White said his extra pace will be important as South Africa’s champions run out on to another artificial pitch in the Scottish capital.

Elrigh Louw is having a breather and will play off the bench against Edinburgh, but such has been his outstanding form that Uys has not started for the Bulls since August 18, against the Pumas in the penultimate round of Currie Cup fixtures before the semi-finals.

“Elrigh has played lots of rugby, he’s gone 80 minutes three times over here,” White explained on Friday. “Muller has trained well and been a part of our group for a long time. He’s a good athlete and quick, which is what you need on a 4G pitch. You can get stuck a bit in defence if you’re not athletic.

“Hopefully Muller brings energy and a spark to the team. He probably hasn’t played as much as we would have liked, but that’s because of the standard of play our loose forwards have produced, not just Elrigh, but also Marco van Staden, Marcell Coetzee and Arno Botha.

“Edinburgh have changed the way they play a bit, their shackles are off and they try to express themselves, and our ability to adapt again to the pace of the game will be important,” White said.

Edinburgh made a flying start to last weekend’s game against the Stormers, scoring twice in the first six minutes, but thereafter they were strangled by some incredibly physical defence by the visitors.

While White said he wants the Bulls to not just defend but also attack, there is no doubt he will be looking to his big men to dominate the contact points.

“I think our defence will be asked some questions and it was very encouraging last weekend, our tackle success being far below standard in the first two games.

“So we’ve got to be consistent and try and grow from last week. But I don’t want us just to defend the whole time, we want to attack as well. Hopefully we can produce a more balanced 80 minutes and not have all-or-nothing at the beginning or end.

“We started well against Connacht, we were seven points up, but then we lost badly. Last weekend we were behind by 13 points early on, so we had to attack and we came back.

“This week’s challenge is a good side with a lot of South Africans involved, which is unique in itself. They will understand the way we play, so it will be a difficult game,” White said.

Bulls team: David Kriel, Madosh Tambwe, Cornal Hendricks, Harold Vorster, Kurt-Lee Arendse, Chris Smith, Embrose Papier; Muller Uys, Arno Botha, Marcell Coetzee (CAPT), Ruan Nortje, Janko Swanepoel, Mornay Smith, Bismarck du Plessis, Lizo Gqoboka. Bench -Schalk Erasmus, Simphiwe Matanzima, Robert Hunt, Walt Steenkamp, Elrigh Louw, Marco Jansen van Vuren, Morne Steyn, Lionel Mapoe.

Tabraiz Shamsi has exploded on to international T20 cricket a bit like a stealth bomb over the last couple of years but he says there is no big secret to his success – just more regular playing time.

Shamsi produced yet another outstanding display on Monday evening in Dublin, taking four for 27 in his four overs to help South Africa to a 33-run win over Ireland. He was the No.1 bowler in the ICC T20 Rankings before the match, with a lead of 102 points over the much-lauded Rashid Khan of Afghanistan, so that gap is only going to grow after the 31-year-old yet again produced the goods.

Since the start of 2019, Shamsi has played 29 T20 Internationals and taken 36 wickets at an average of 20.05 and with an economy rate of 6.44. They are phenomenal figures and they reflect how crafty the left-arm wrist-spinner has become in being able to both take wickets and stem the run-flow.

“Playing regularly, I am gaining so much more experience. I have learnt that there are more ways to skin the cat, there are two ways for me to win games for the Proteas: I can take wickets or I can keep the batsmen quiet. As I’ve got older, I’ve realised that taking wickets is not everything, I’ve become more flexible. But it’s also the first time I’m getting regular game time and that’s why you see the consistency.

“For obvious reasons, I didn’t get that before and I’m not disputing selection at all [Imran Tahir stood in his way]. But playing regularly, you get to learn quickly from your mistakes and you can implement the good things more. And when things don’t go well, you stay positive through those patches and try and contribute to the team in other ways,” Shamsi said.

The inspirational man of the moment has always got as excited as a puppy whenever he takes a wicket, but he has also added a steelier edge now, working on intimidating batsmen. Shamsi admitted that it is a case of being a fast bowler trapped in a spinner’s body.

“From a young age I was a seam bowler, but I was told I was not fast enough so I switched to spin. But my early heroes were guys like Andre Nel, Dale Steyn and Allan Donald. That sort of aggression can disrupt the batsmen and I’m one of the guys in charge of making sure we have a presence on the field and that we never back down.

“It always helps me if the fast bowlers have taken wickets up front, my job is a lot more difficult when they don’t, and whenever I’ve done well, you often see the other bowlers have too, and George Linde too. I just try to bowl in the areas I want to and wickets are not guaranteed because it depends on how the batsman plays the ball,” Shamsi said.

Probably only the most ardent of South African rugby fans will know the name Dugald Macdonald, but he is Springbok number 470 having first slipped the famous Green and Gold jersey over his head in a third-floor room of the President Hotel in Sea Point, on 7 June 1974, while a typical Cape Town cold front splattered rain on to the balcony outside.

Macdonald would wear the jersey that had captured his imagination only once in a Test match, and that was actually a fortnight later when he played in the second Test against the British Lions at Loftus Versfeld. That’s because he was a reserve for the first Test at Newlands, and in those days the replacements sat in the stadium because the ‘bench’ was hardly ever used.

In a disastrous 3-0 series loss for the Springboks, he was destined to become one of the unfortunate one-Test wonders as the national selectors panicked and chose 36 different players for the four Tests, the final match in Johannesburg being drawn. According to veteran rugby writer John Bishop, who covered the entire tour, “Dugald should have been there from start to finish, he was one hell of a player. One of those guys who were simply forgotten about in the chaos of the 1974 tour, a powerful number eight with excellent ball skills. He should have been a Bok great”.

Macdonald has just released a book about the whole experience – the series being one of the most traumatic in South African rugby – called Ja-Nee. It is an engrossing look into the past, a study in how the mentality of Springbok rugby was built and how those attitudes still influence it today, but as with all great writing, it also brings applications and warnings for the future.

And it’s not just about rugby either. It provides a fascinating snapshot of White South African life in the 1970s. It is evocative, humorous and thought-provoking all at the same time.

The sun was shining brightly on that midwinter’s day in Pretoria, but Macdonald makes a decent argument for the Springboks not so much being panicky as arrogant. They were convinced that the Lions could not possibly be better than them and a few changes would sort out their scrum and allow them to dominate possession.

It’s a recurring story in our rugby: Back in 1992 when we returned from isolation and expected to still be better than Australia and New Zealand because “the Currie Cup is the strongest competition in the world” and instead lost both Tests comfortably. And then just last week the Bulls travelled from Pretoria to Italy, everyone back home confident that they would be returning from their jaunt with the Rainbow Cup, only to be played off the park by Benetton Treviso.

When South African rugby retreats into the laager mentality, we tend to become dangerously insular whenever we have been cut off from international trends.

Macdonald was not your typical Springbok of the 1970s, he was a city boy, schooled in Cape Town, he was an Oxford Blue and also played for Parma in Italy and Toulouse in France. Some might say paranoid 1970s South Africa was never likely to give him many more than one Test cap.

This broader world view has allowed him to identify an over-reliance on physicality as being a possible albatross around the necks of the current world champions, who have not played since outmuscling England in the World Cup final in Japan in November 2019. While the Springboks have been inactive, the rest of the world has been plotting.

“If we understood the roots of South African rugby then we’ll know why physicality has actually been responsible for many of our defeats. I fear we are winding up for another one because physicality is all the Lions are talking about. But if we don’t have technique and lucidity, physicality can only get you so far.

“Whenever we have just played inklim rugby it has been the beginning of the end, it’s been a problem down the years, and the same thing is growing again. Physicality is great at the right time and in the right place, but so much thought needs to go into it otherwise it’s helluva easy to get carried away. Fortunately we have really good leaders in the game now,” Macdonald told me.

*Ja-Nee is published by Flyleaf Publishing and is widely available in bookstores and online.