Ken Borland

With the first-choice Springbok pack hit by injuries, it makes little sense for the squad for the British and Irish Lions series to be loaded with outside backs, but that’s exactly what coach Jacques Nienaber and director of rugby Rassie Erasmus have done.

Their 46-strong Springbok squad contains eight outside backs, the most well-stocked department of all with one more player than either the loose forwards or props. The allocation of seven loose forwards includes Duane Vermeulen, who suffered what looked like a serious ankle injury at the weekend, and amongst the six locks named for the series, two of them – Lood de Jager and RG Snyman – are still injured.

There are two utility forwards included in Jean-Luc du Preez and Rynhardt Elstadt, but the cynical might surmise that the outside backs have been overstocked in order to get the transformation numbers up – there is only one White player amongst the back three in fullback Willie le Roux.

“Local derbies are like Springbok trials and when you play strength versus strength week in, week out, like the Rainbow Cup has been, then you expect a number of injuries. So every weekend has been quite nervous for us, fortunately there haven’t been too many injuries, but there are many niggles in the squad. We’ll have to reassess after the first couple of weeks.

“But the good thing is our local players will be used to physical rugby, which will be a big part of the Lions series. The big question is when is a player 100% ready for Test rugby, when do we experiment? We play Georgia twice, but we have not played together since the World Cup, so we don’t want to experiment there,” Erasmus said.

Erasmus admitted that he was not optimistic that Vermeulen will be available for the Lions series, and the uncapped Jasper Wiese is likely to replace him at eighthman, with the World Cup winning coach saying the 25-year-old’s form for the Leicester Tigers in the English Premiership cannot be ignored.

“Duane has to be doubtful with his ankle. He’s on his way to Cape Town for scans. I spoke to Jake White [Bulls coach] and it looked bad. For Duane to limp off so early in a match is very unusual, so we are fearing the worst,” Erasmus admitted.

“But Jasper Wiese can play eighthman and we cannot ignore the form he is in, he was outstanding in the Premiership and he knocked the door down weekly. He is explosive and we’re really lucky that he’s versatile, he can play openside as well.”

In just 14 Premiership appearances, the former Free State Cheetahs player has made 701 running metres, beaten 54 defenders, has a 90% tackle success rate and has made eightline-breaks.

Not giving away possession or penalties is what the Sharks have identified as the key things they need to rectify as they go into their Rainbow Cup match against the Lions on Saturday on the back of successive defeats to the Bulls and Stormers, according to lock Reniel Hugo.

The setbacks have left the Sharks four points adrift of the log-leading Bulls and sitting in third place below the Stormers on points difference. If the Lions win at Ellis Park on Saturday then they could actually leapfrog the KwaZulu-Natalians.

“It’s not nice having two losses behind our names but we have the opportunity to rectify our mistakes this weekend. We are conceding a lot of penalties and that just allows the opposition to kick out and set the rolling maul, which then takes a lot of energy to defend. So we have been working very hard on our discipline so we don’t concede penalties and also on keeping the ball.

“Against the Bulls we had to defend more than a dozen rolling mauls and sometimes your legs just give in. But sometimes it’s just one guy coming in at the wrong place and that breaks the system. A few guys have made mistakes and I was one of them. As an older guy, hopefully I can bring a bit more experience and try and get the team to gel together better,” Hugo said on Tuesday.

The Sharks have won their last four matches in Johannesburg, dating back to their 26-19 Super Rugby defeat in their opening game of 2018, and Hugo said their focus is squarely on becoming the first South African team to contest the Rainbow Cup final.

“The Lions lost their first three games, but they weren’t big losses and they had lots of opportunities to win. It just shows that all four teams in this competition are very good and the quality of rugby is such that there are no easy games. So it’s going to be very important for us to be clinical, we must stop them, get turnovers and create opportunities for ourselves.

“But the Lions showed how tough this competition is when they beat the Bulls to open the Rainbow Cup up massively. If we can now win both these last games then we’ll be in with a shout of playing in that final in Italy,” Hugo said.

Sharks coach Sean Everitt was asked after their Rainbow Cup hammering at the hands of the Bulls at Loftus Versfeld what went wrong when they ran back out on to the field for the second half, and his simple answer was they were “manhandled”, which is why a 9-12 halftime deficit turned into a 43-9 hiding.

And it was the magnificent Bulls pack who did the damage, Duane Vermeulen once again being the talisman as the home forwards dominated the lineouts, scrummed powerfully, were commanding at the maul and without mercy on the gainline.

“The Bulls forwards were outstanding and forced us to give away penalties. They dominated us physically and we had no answer, which was disappointing. We battled to stop their maul and that led to penalty on top of penalty, for which we paid the price this time. We were manhandled.

“Conceding a penalty at the maul just compounds the problem because then they kick to the corner and maul again. And when we were in a good position, we would have a lineout turnover or concede a penalty at the scrum. So it’s not as if they exploited our game-plan, but rather the fundamentals of the game which we did not get right,” Everitt said after the heavy defeat.

The Sharks coach did not feel that his team were particularly ill-disciplined, but said an enormous penalty count against them was rather due to an unrelenting battering they were receiving. The Bulls were truly merciless and flyhalves Morne Steyn and Chris Smith converted all nine of their kicks at goal.

“I can’t fault the effort in the first half, when we stuck to the plan well and fired all the shots – the Bulls did not look like scoring. We attacked well in that first half, I thought our plan was well-balanced between kicking and ball-in-hand, but then we’d lose the ball out wide. It was just a case of not being able to convert.

“But in the second half they made us tired and fatigued and it’s always a tough day when you’re going backwards and conceding penalties. You have to credit the Bulls, they were outstanding, they hardly made a mistake and they kept us out. They have improved a lot under Jake White, but there is still a lot of rugby to be played and we are certainly not out of the race,” Everitt said.

Cricket South Africa’s Interim Board have clarified the process for the appointment of independent directors and, as long as the Members Council are still behaving like adults and have given the new MoI majority approval by 11am on Wednesday morning, what the new constitution says about the recruitment of new board members will be thoroughly explained to the public.

The Interim Board on Wednesday morning disputed suggestions published by The Citizen that they have any knowledge of who the applicants to be independent directors are and that they play any role in drawing up a shortlist for the Nominations Committee.

“The Interim Board does not know who has applied and will not be involved in the nominations process other than recruiting one former CSA president to serve on the Nominations Committee. All the applications are under lock and key in the office and will be passed on directly from the office to the Nominations Committee as soon as they are in place,” Interim Board spokeswoman Judith February told The Citizen.

The Interim Board hope to make the whole Memorandum of Incorporation public once the Special Resolution accepting it has been confirmed and will hold a briefing to take the media through the process thereafter.

The Nominations Committee also needs to be put in place later this week and that six-member panel will comprise either a men’s or women’s former international player nominated by SACA, alongside a former CSA president nominated by the Interim Board, a Members Council representative and people from the Institute of Chartered Accountants, Institute of Directors and the Legal Practice Council.

“The Interim Board is certainly not going to be appointing the new board and according to our agreement with the sports minister, nobody from the Interim Board is going to be standing for the new board,” February added.