Ken Borland

Ex-Pumas loose forward Renaldo Bothma returns to the Cell C Sharks starting line-up in place of the injured Willem Alberts for their Vodacom SuperRugby match against the Toyota Cheetahs in Bloemfontein on Saturday after director of rugby Gary Gold announced a team with four changes on Thursday.

The sands of time have moved quickly at Loftus Versfeld this year and Bulls coach Nollis Marais is already deep into his planning for the new SuperRugby season early next year.

While he confirmed that he is still having “on-going negotiations” with a couple of players with a view to luring them to Loftus Versfeld, Marais said he believes he already has the bulk of the players he needs; it’s just that their talents have previously been buried.

“We will add on a bit to the Currie Cup side and I’m busy working on that, talking to a couple of guys, but we’ve got the players, we just need to develop them. The skills aren’t good enough and there will be a huge emphasis on that. Before I do any game plan, I need to know the execution will be there, so the skills and conditioning need to be better, that’s going to be a huge drive for me,” Marais said.

The newly-appointed SuperRugby coach has his eye on forwards in the main in terms of acquisitions, because with the players at Loftus Versfeld already, the Bulls should have a very exciting backline next year.

“I’ve come a long way with Handre Pollard, we won the Varsity Cup together at Tuks, and he’s an excellent player. I met with him last weekend before he left for Japan and with the way we want to play in future and the way the game is developing, he’s going to have a massive role to play because he’s a brilliant flyhalf. He just needs some freedom around a few things.

“I was the first to try Jesse Kriel at centre, because I rated Duncan Matthews as a very good fullback and they turned an U21 final for me. So we have Duncan and Warrick Gelant at 15, who are both good young fullbacks, and Jesse Kriel can play both, but I like him at 13,” Marais said.

Adding to the backline riches are Springboks Rudi Paige and Bjorn Basson, while in midfield, Marais has tough choices to make at inside centre between Burger Odendaal, Jan Serfontein and Dries Swanepoel.

SuperRugby completes the first month of its 2015 season this weekend and it’s not surprising, given the generally low standard of officiating, that the referees and their assistants have been in the spotlight this week.

There has been furious debate about whether the laws of the game were correctly applied at Loftus Versfeld last weekend when the Bulls beat the Sharks; and there is uproar steadily building as well over referee Nick Briant’s performance yesterday in Hamilton, especially towards the end of the Highlanders’ shock win over the Chiefs.

The Loftus Versfeld furore was mostly about Law 12 – the knock-on or throw forward, but perhaps the way to avoid these controversies that do serious damage to the game (nobody wants to watch a sport where the officials decide the outcome rather than the athletes) is to go to Law 6.

This law is about the Match Officials, but nowhere does it say they have to be competent!

In the white-hot arena of top-class rugby, mistakes will inevitably happen and nobody should crucify referees over those. But when a person sitting in a box in the stands gets several replays of an incident and still can’t make the correct decision, then questions need to be asked. The problem is that officials are way above the law and there is no accountability; their decisions never have to be explained. It’s a prime breeding ground for matchfixing, but WorldRugby is in denial of that as well.

The forward pass incident at Loftus has been dressed up as a technical issue involving the direction of the hands being obscured at the time of Jesse Kriel’s pass. TMO Johan Greeff believed the evidence was inconclusive, never mind the ball clearly travelling metres forward on its way to Francois Hougaard. It was such an obvious forward pass that most people picked it up while watching the game live.

If TMOs are going to be seen to have made the correct decision, which is the whole point of having them, then they are going to have to ditch this whole obsession with which direction the hands were going at the time of the pass. None of that technical mumbo jumbo, nothing about gravity or momentum, is even mentioned in the laws of rugby.

Obviously momentum is going to cause a ball to drift forward if the player who passes it is running, but this cannot result in the sort of forward pass Kriel threw to Hougaard.

“A throw forward occurs when a player throws or passes the ball forward. ‘Forward’ means towards the opposing team’s dead ball line,” is all Law 12 states. It’s simple but for several years now officials have conspired to complicate the whole issue with all this talk of “the direction of the hands”.

While they are at it, the lawmakers should also make the ruck laws simpler because, as things stand in this era of “interpretation”, the World Cup final is probably going to be decided by who the referee is.

It cannot be good for the game that the Bulls can have a referee one week (Andrew Lees) who barely blew anything at the ruck and the next week be officiated by somebody who blows to the letter of the law.

Nobody wants to have a game dominated by the officials, but they currently have way too much influence on the result and spectators have started to desert rugby as a result.

The Bulls produced a display of precision and power to beat the Cheetahs 30-25 in Bloemfontein and put themselves on the brink of claiming the Vodacom SuperRugby South African Conference title and a home playoff match.

The Bulls, thanks to their combative forwards, who dominated the gain line and the lineouts, were in control for most of the crunch encounter and led 30-13 going into the last 10 minutes.

Tries by flyhalf Riaan Smit, after magical hands by inside centre Robert Ebersohn, and prop Trevor Nyakane then claimed a bonus point for the Cheetahs and kept them above the Crusaders in fifth place on the overall standings.

But for the other 70 minutes, they seldom threatened the Bulls line. The Cheetahs seemed to be drowning in a sea of blue defenders, every collision seemingly another metre gained by the Bulls, and the Thick Blue Line was no laughing matter for an increasingly desperate home side.

The one area where the Cheetahs did dominate, however, was in the scrums and Coenie Oosthuizen, Adriaan Strauss, Lourens Adriaanse and Trevor Nyakane were all rewarded with Springbok call-ups shortly after the game.

It’s clearly an area of concern for the Bulls as it will allow whoever they face in the playoffs to target a specific area of weakness, and coach Frans Ludeke hauled loosehead prop Dean Greyling off the field as early as the 44th minute.

But while Greyling and Werner Kruger are struggling in the scrums, it doesn’t seem to be costing the Bulls games … yet. And besides, Greyling and Kruger are at the forefront of the massive hits the Bulls tight forwards put in on the gain line and one can understand Ludeke’s reluctance to jettison them completely.

Hooker Chiliboy Ralepelle is also not renowned for his scrummaging, but his open play is outstanding and it was his charge through the defence that allowed the Bulls to make the breakthrough in the eighth minute, as Kruger barged over the tryline.

The only time the Bulls defence looked as if it might be breached was when the Cheetahs’ roaming wing Willie le Roux had the ball in hand. He scored from a typical piece of individual brilliance in the 13th minute when, with nothing much on, he chipped over the defence and gathered to score under the poles.

But the next five minutes were dominated by the Bulls’ direct runners, so strong with ball in hand (lock Flip van der Merwe in particular), and the inevitable ruck penalty saw Morné Steyn kick for the corner, the rolling maul put in place and flank Deon Stegmann scoring.

The Cheetahs were still in touch at 10-17 down at half-time, but with the hugely talented Jan Serfontein in white-hot form at inside centre, the shell-shocked home side soon found themselves 30-13 down after two penalties by Steyn and a try by Jano Vermaak that had its roots in the 20-year-old crashing through the home line. There was also great interplay between replacement forwards Grant Hattingh and Dewald Potgieter, who were both able to come on and make a major impact, with the latter throwing a precision pass for the scrumhalf to complete the try.

The Stormers emerged victorious (19-11) from their arm-wrestle with the Southern Kings at a sodden Newlands, fullback Joe Pietersen kicking 14 points in blustery conditions and ensuring the visitors were kept in their own half for much of the game.

Flank Deon Fourie also scored a try, but the Stormers were victorious because they won the kicking battle, their set-pieces were better and they shaded the collisions.

The Kings were determined and skilful, and can point to two gross misfortunes having a material impact on the outcome.

Flyhalf Demetri Catrakilis, part of the Springbok training camp and very close to selection for the final squad according to Heyneke Meyer, had a recurrence of his calf injury and pulled out just before the game and left the Kings without a major weapon for the kicking and territorial battle.

And Fourie’s try came from a rolling maul after the Stormers had been given a lineout throw five metres from the line when replacement scrumhalf Dewaldt Duvenhage’s chip deflected off a Kings defender and rolled into the corner.

The Kings had the Stormers under pressure in the closing minutes, scoring through flank Wimpie van der Walt after a lineout drive, but flyhalf George Whitehead missed the crucial conversion and the visitors had the chance to kick a penalty for the losing bonus point but went for the try instead and lost the ball.

Jean de Villiers had another inspirational game for the Stormers at outside centre, although clearly no one had much fun in the awful conditions.

The Kings can now concentrate all their resources on the almost-inevitable promotion/relegation matches they will have to play against the Lions at the end of July.

And it looks like they will need them after the Lions demolished Samoa 74-14 at Ellis Park.

While one can never read too much into such a one-sided game, the fact that the Samoans were all at sea in the set-pieces and defending out wide suggests the Lions have weapons that can really hurt the Kings.

Super Rugby Logs – after Round 16:

Combined Log

South African Conference

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