Ken Borland

Ruan Pienaar is a highly experienced man when it comes to playing against European opposition and the scrumhalf said on Tuesday that the Sharks dare not give Cardiff Blues any weak points to exploit in their defence as they meet on the 4G pitch at the Arms Park on Saturday.

South African teams are starting to come to terms with playing on artificial turf in the UK, and the Cardiff Blues are known for their attacking style on their fast-paced home surface. Plus, having lost to the Bulls last weekend via a dramatic second-half comeback, they will be taking nothing for granted on Saturday.

“Cardiff will be disappointed to have two losses on the bounce,” Pienaar said, “and I think they felt in control in the first half of their match against the Bulls. They are a good team, so they will be desperate to bounce back.

“They have a lot of dangerous players and if we give them time on the ball and let them dictate the tempo, then it will be a really tough challenge against them.

“You’ve got to be clinical and really accurate on those pitches because the game is a lot faster and the tempo much higher. We’ve got to be on-point defensively or their dangerous back three will hurt us.

“Rhys Priestland pulls the strings really well for them at flyhalf and it’s tough on a 4G pitch to defend breaches if they get through your line,” Pienaar said.

The former Ulster stalwart said the Sharks’ performance on Saturday will need to have the same properties they showed in convincingly beating the Ospreys last weekend, also with a brilliant second-half display.

“Against the Ospreys we played in the right areas, our discipline was good and we took our chances. We responded very well to our first two losses and you have to adapt to how the referees blow over here.

“Playing first up against Munster was always going to be a tough introduction, a massive learning curve because they are a very good team and especially difficult at Thomond Park.

“Our discipline let us down against them and there were costly errors, but against Glasgow Warriors, if we had done one or two things differently, then it could have been a different story.

“It’s a completely different way of playing over here, but we have been fortunate to have really good weather, normally it is quite miserable already at this time of year. I played here for a long time, you know the opposition is going to be really well coached and our key decision-makers are crucial,” Pienaar said.

“We are adapting well to the different interpretations at the breakdown,” Bulls consultant Nollis Marais said on Monday in respect of the journey the team has taken from initial teething problems in the rucks to it now being a strength of the juggernaut side who are now six points clear at the top of the SuperRugby Unlocked log.

Marais is the breakdown specialist on Jake White’s coaching staff and he admitted that it has not been an easy area to perfect so far this season.

“There have been different interpretations at the breakdown and we do a lot of research into what the different referees want and try and prepare the players for that. We’re getting quite good guidelines from the referees who assist us and I think the breakdown should just get better and better and by the second half of the competition we should be certain of what we’re doing.

“We adapted well to what referee AJ Jacobs wanted at the weekend, we conceded a couple of penalties early on against the Stormers and we knew it would be a physical battle at the breakdown because Steven Kitshoff and Jaco Coetzee like to go hard in trying to get the ball. But our plan worked and by the end of the game we were winning the penalties,” Marais said.

The Bulls are currently ranked as the top team in the competition in terms of turnovers won, and that has largely been due to the outstanding efforts of Duane Vermeulen and Marco van Staden, although Marais did point out contesting ball at the breakdowns is something every player is expected to contribute towards.

“The breakdown is all about team-work, from number one to 15, the whole team is drilled in that area and even Travis Ismaiel and Stedman Gans were involved in turnovers against the Stormers. But every week Marco does a review of the clips with me and at first he tended to chase every ruck, but now he gets better reads and is getting better and better at deciding when to try and steal the ball and when not to steal.

“As far as Duane goes, well you just can’t move Thor, can you? You need 15 players to move Thor. If Duane is at a breakdown then I know we’re going to get a penalty,” Marais said.

The Bulls are now preparing for a different breakdown challenge against the Lions at Ellis Park on Saturday night.

“The Lions want to play quickly, so we have to try and make their ball slower. They can be very physical too, but then they’re just trying to make the game quicker all the time. So it’s very important that we don’t allow them quick ball,” Marais said.

By all accounts (and there have been many in the last week), Pat Lambie enjoyed a very good international career, playing 56 Tests, going to two World Cups and scoring 153 points for the Springboks. But there are many excellent judges who believe South African rugby still never got as much out of the Sharks flyhalf as they should have.

Despite a fine record of delivering when it mattered most, as well as performing at a level of consistency that all the great flyhalves have, Lambie only made 22 starts for the Springboks and was seldom given a decent run of games in which to establish himself. In fact, Lambie only once started five Tests in a row and that was at fullback in 2011, from the last two games of the Rugby Championship through the World Cup.

In his favoured position of flyhalf, Lambie never played more than three games on the trot in the number 10 jersey, on the end-of-year European tours of 2012 and 2014.

“Pat was an exceptional rugby player and as the dust settles on his premature retirement and people reflect back, I think many will realise he was the one that got away. No Springbok coach really made him his number one, nailed his flag to the mast and said Pat is my number one flyhalf. But we saw it in Super Rugby and Currie Cup finals that Pat was at his best in important games.

“He wasn’t picked consistently enough, even though he never let the side down, and then they moved him between fullback and flyhalf when he should have just been at flyhalf. It’s a great pity and it was disappointing, I know Dick Muir always said we must just put him in and play him when we were assistants together with the Springboks,” current USA coach Gary Gold, a member of the Springboks’ coaching team from 2008-2011 and head coach of the Sharks between 2014-2016, told Saturday Citizen.

As former Springbok captain and inside centre Jean de Villiers attests, Lambie was the sort of player a coach and team could rely on week after week.

“Pat would always just get the job done, he had that ability to perform under pressure, as that massive kick against the All Blacks showed. He was a fantastic player and his personality came through on the field in that he stayed calm in the big moments. He was the biggest gentleman in world rugby but he still performed with authority, he could leave his mark on the game.

“He was the sort of flyhalf who could dominate and control the game. I’ll never forget the 2010 Currie Cup final and his brilliant performance against us [Western Province] that showed his class. On two end-of-year tours we played 10 and 12 next to each other and we only lost one game, showing that Pat could really get the job done in difficult conditions,” De Villiers said.

And yet Heyneke Meyer, the Springbok coach who took over in 2012, binned Lambie to the bench at the start of the 2013 international season and again for the 2015 Rugby Championship.

Meyer has spoken warmly this week about his appreciation for Lambie’s talents and his personality in the team space, but he did perhaps let slip why he was reluctant to fully trust Lambie.

“As we all know, he wasn’t the biggest rugby player ever [1.77m, 86kg], but he had a serious all-round game and that included a very solid tackle and commitment. He would put his body on the line 100% of the time, never shied away from the contact side of things, and was safe under a high ball as well.

“Pat is way up there with the best talents I ever coached, but I will say this without any doubt at all: there was no better human being in my Bok squads. Wherever he has gone in the world professionally, he has quickly come to be considered one of the most likeable guys in the fold. I never coached a guy with better manners than him,” Meyer told Sport24.

That Lambie is a top-class human being is a recurring theme when speaking to people who know him well. Former Springbok captain Gary Teichmann had a different relationship with the Michaelhouse product as CEO of the Sharks, but is just as effusive in his praise.

“Pat is a guy with incredible ability but easy to deal with. He says it as it is, there’s never an angle with him, and it was always a very easy conversation with him – he’s all about honesty and transparency,” Teichmann said.

But more than that, he was a phenomenal rugby player, with the well-travelled Gold comparing him to a legend of the game like Jonny Wilkinson.

“Pat was potentially our Jonny Wilkinson, he probably has the same dimensions and Joel Stransky and Dan Carter were also not the biggest flyhalves. What Wilkinson did for England, I believe Pat could have done for South Africa because he’s a similar player and personality,” Gold said.

https://citizen.co.za/sport/south-african-sport/sa-rugby-sport/2072068/the-inconvenient-truth-about-pat-lambie/

Nielsen Sports, the provider of analytics for the sports industry, recently gave their annual presentation on the biggest trends in sports business and the two major talking points over the last year are the rise of e-Sports and the fact that sports bodies and their sponsors have to know who their fans are in this rapidly evolving marketplace.

Their research shows that, on average, only 10-15% of any sport’s fans are actually ‘game experts’ – people who have intimate knowledge of the rules, history, players, tactics etc. So any sports body or sponsor that only targets this section of the fan base are clearly missing out, for instance, on the 30-35% of ‘connection fans’ – for them it’s about the big event and they are the people packing out the stadia for Pink Day, the Cape Town Sevens rugby or the Durban July.

In the past, the relationship between a sport and a brand was based on the sponsor wanting visibility and the sport just wanting money. But this relationship is now much broader and the rights a sports body sells need to be more flexible and more tailored to their specific partners. Sponsors these days want to own stories and content rules in this digital age in which internet advertising spend overtook that for TV worldwide last year.

It was disappointing to hear that our traditional sports like rugby and cricket are battling to grow in this environment. In South Africa, 25% fewer millennials are interested in rugby, and cricket has seen the same drop in support.

The fastest growing sport in the world is e-Sports, which is basically what professional, competitive gaming is called, and unfortunately, rugby and cricket just don’t have games on the market that are good enough. Research has shown that there is a strong crossover between people who play the virtual game on their computers and supporting the actual ‘live’ sport. For instance, Fifa’s eWorldCup drew seven million gamers last year and Formula One enjoyed similar success with their eSports Final, the winner of which gained a one-year contract as a simulator driver for McLaren.

That e-Sports is rapidly evolving into a major player in the sports industry is shown by the fact that one-third of all their fans came onboard in the last year and they are typically millennial men with money to spend. Which means major global brands like Gillette, C-Smart and Mercedes are moving into that space, the higher LSM also attracting sponsors like Audi and Mountain Dew. Gaming is a $32 billion industry now and at the competitive level it is a mega-production, a whole show with adverts, sponsored decks and kids packed into stadia.

This year’s Overwatch League features 12 franchises based in cities like Boston, London and Shanghai who paid $20 million each to participate. The broadcast rights were sold for $90 million and the average audience is 280 000 per minute.

Speaking of broadcast rights, this field has also become extraordinarily broad for sponsors and sports bodies. Pay TV’s influence is still stable, but there are disruptors now in the picture, especially tech giants like Amazon and Facebook and even Twitter.

The cellphone has become a way of life and we are living in a mobile-first generation. Although high data costs hold us back in South Africa, 20% of local football viewers watch via internet streams, with 69% of those people watching the game live and 42% of those watching the whole game.

Rugby has 25% of its viewers streaming the game, 68% of that watching live and 48% for the whole game; cricket’s figures are 22% streaming, 78% of that live and 40% watching the full game.

The sports industry is certainly a very fluid environment for rights-holders and sponsors to get their heads around.

https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/the-citizen-kzn/20180623/282484299488829