Oh to be a fly on the wall when the coaches deliver their pre-match oratory ahead of Saturday’s Carling Currie Cup semifinals. The timing of the deciding phase of the domestic season has conspired to deliver some very mixed messages that could make the pre-match talks more interesting than they’d usually be.
As they are play-off games, you’d expect the teams to be sent in to battle in the games featuring the Fidelity ADT Lions against the Toyota Cheetahs in Johannesburg and the Vodacom Bulls against the Hollywoodbets Sharks in Pretoria later in the day with the instruction to empty the tank and to put their bodies on the line, to “play as if there is no tomorrow”.
The fight is ON 😮💨
— The Sharks (@SharksRugby) September 12, 2024
#CarlingCurrieCup #BULvSHA pic.twitter.com/EIxQWlPf4z
But these aren’t Currie Cup play-offs being played at the end of the season, before the players can take a well earned break and wait up for the start of the next season a few months later.
Maybe the Cheetahs players can do that, and some selected members of teams that won’t be involved going forward into the next challenge, but with the serious business of the Vodacom United Rugby Championship now just two weeks away, the extent to which bodies should be put on the line has to be measured up against the element of risk.
DIFFICULT POSITION FOR COACHES
Sharks XV coach John Plumtree said it earlier in the week - this for his team is a pre-season game, but not with the 28 players, with the same management of the game time of individual players that entails, that is usually allowed for a warmup fixture.
It’s a proper Currie Cup semifinal, meaning a proper game, so there will only be 23 players allowed. So around half the team will have to go through the full 80 minutes.
You have to appreciate that as much as there might be a risk to players who are being asked to play what should be a high intensity play-off game when they have just come off their pre-season and are a fortnight away from what they have been preparing for, the coaches are also in a difficult position.
Plumtree spoke mostly about the negatives of having to play this game now and mentioned very few positives when he was on a URC media platform earlier this week. But when he held his team announcement press conference on Thursday, with the Sharks the only team to have been announced thus far, he spoke about having to respect the Currie Cup.
Which was the right thing for him to do, as he was talking on the Currie Cup platform. But while he said some past Sharks players had been down to Kings Park to speak to the players about the Currie Cup and its history, and past Sharks and Natal achievements, he was honest enough to admit that the trip to Loftus was mainly pre-season preparation for the URC.
“I am sure that I am speaking for the other coaches when I say that one of my biggest concerns is that we avoid injuries,” said a coach who already has his fair share of injuries to deal with ahead of the kick-off to a URC season that is far more ultra-marathon than it is a sprint.
Of course, rugby is a contact sport, and you can get injuries in a pre-season warmup game, but the point is that you wouldn’t get a coach talking about his desire to avoid injuries on the eve of a semifinal played at the end of season, as these games historically have been.
When Plumtree said “We are not looking beyond this week” was he also hinting that if his team does make the final, which falls just seven days before he has to be in Connacht with his URC team for a difficult start to that competition, he will return the young players that got the Sharks to their third spot on the log to the team?
It would appear fair to do so, perhaps also to recall JP Pietersen, who did such an excellent job as that side’s coach for the first eight rounds, along with their captain Nick Hatton, and let himself and his URC team focus on the job at hand.
After finishing well outside of the placings in the URC last year, and only getting into the Investec Champions Cup through the back door by winning the EPCR Challenge Cup, Plumtree knows how important it is to start the URC well. It was their poor start that set the tone for the Sharks last season.
CHEETAHS CAN GO FOR BROKE
Of course not all the teams will have a URC focus. Certainly the Cheetahs won’t, and that makes them dangerous, but they are also playing against a Lions team that appears to be taking the Currie Cup, and the goal of winning it, more seriously than the other sides who also play in the URC.
The Lions finished top of the log and played the Currie Cup season with more URC players than the other sides. That may catch up with them later on in the season when URC and Challenge Cup commitments mount up, but the signals from the Johannesburg union is that they want to replicate what happened in the middle of last decade.
They won the Currie Cup in 2015 and then used that as a platform for relative success in Super Rugby, where they played in three successive finals.
The Bulls are better off financially and have a bigger squad, so they played what you could call their alternative URC/Champions Cup team at times during the domestic competition, while the Sharks and DHL Western Province, with the latter not making the play-offs, were effectively age group teams bolstered by a few experienced players either not particularly necessary to their URC campaign or needing game time after long injury layoffs.
LIONS FAVOURITES TO LIFT THE TROPHY
On form you’d expect the Lions to beat the Cheetahs and host next week’s final and given their ambition, you’d expect them to win it. They comprehensively outplayed the Bulls two weeks ago and it would seem unlikely that Jake White would want too many of his URC players playing in a Currie Cup final a week before the URC starts in Edinburgh.
It’s Currie Cup semi-final time! 🔥 Come through and show the boys some love at Emirates Airline Park!
— Lions (@LionsRugbyCo) September 11, 2024
🆚 @CheetahsRugby
🗓: Sat, 14 September
⏰: 14:30
🎟: https://t.co/b2Hvo478Q9
🏟 : Emirates Airline Park
🏆: @TheCurrieCup #LionsPride🦁 pic.twitter.com/f5u66U6YDc
But we will see, as it is also true that before there was a shift in schedule, next weekend, when the final is to be played, was going to see URC derbies between the Sharks and Lions and the Stormers and Bulls.
That change was driven by the Lions as it appears the other teams were happy to divide their resources between a Currie Cup final and the URC, which is why it wouldn’t surprise were the Sharks to use Pietersen as coach next week and return to their Currie Cup team. That was clearly what they were going to do had the schedule remained as planned.
Who will win the other semifinal? We know the Sharks have picked a strong, URC strength team for what they see as their full dress-rehearsal for that competition, so they stand a good chance. Much will depend though on the Bulls’ attitude and their selection.
Both should be good games and highly watchable, and should have more edge to them than a normal warmup game would. As Plumtree says, if the Lions and Bulls reach the final, it should also be a bigger event than the last few finals, although there is some irony in that because it was really the smaller unions that contested those finals that the Currie Cup exists for these days.
Carling Currie Cup semifinals
Fidelity ADT Lions v Toyota Cheetahs (Johannesburg, Saturday 2:30pm)
Vodacom Bulls v Hollywoodbets Sharks XV (Pretoria, Saturday 5pm)