Bulls return to Loftus requiring introspection

The Vodacom Bulls team will return to Pretoria today amid much concern about both recent results and the sudden fall from grace of a side not too long ago considered one of South Africa’s best hopes in the Vodacom United Rugby Championship.

With their Heineken Champions Cup campaign now a thing of the past, the team come home to Pretoria with the luggage of 10 straight losses across all competitions, a Currie Cup side that is bottom of the log and a URC side that is floundering and could well miss out on qualification for the playoffs altogether.

It is a long way from where they were a few months back, and while Director of Rugby Jake White has resisted calling it a crisis, there are a lot of alarm bells ringing at Loftus Versfeld that will come under scrutiny this week.

Talks with stakeholders at the Bulls have underlined the growing concern that White has “hit his ceiling” and that some drastic changes are needed if the Bulls are to avoid falling behind both the Cell C Sharks and the DHL Stormers.

Those in the halls of Loftus Versfeld point to the “obsession” of beating the Stormers, White’s medical emergency that put him out of action for six weeks and came at the wrong time, and a growing inability of some of the bigger names in the side to produce the sort of rugby that took them to the URC final last year.

There has been a worry for quite a while now about the form of some senior players - including Lionel Mapoe, Cornal Hendricks and even flyhalf Chris Smith and scrumhalf Zak Burger, who have suffered as the team’s results went backwards.

Then there is a growing concern over Johan Goosen, who a year ago was punted as the answer to the Springboks’ flyhalf dilemma, but has since had a string of bad performances and injuries and is a shadow of the player that White believes can be the best in the world.

To be fair to Goosen, he had his first game back from a shoulder injury in Welkom this past weekend but looked out of sorts in an environment that he would be expected to dominate.

Similarly, there are questions asked about Jacques du Plessis, who also struggled with injuries and has not shown the sort of form that White wanted from him to dominate up front.

The Currie Cup side, with rookie coach Edgar Marutlulle, has recorded four losses - including giving the Griffons their first Currie Cup victory since 1999 - and the disbelief that a side that had Goosen, Du Plessis, Wandisile Simelane, Mapoe and Lizo Gqoboka - to name a few, could perform so badly in Welkom is a major concern.

BACKWARD SLIDE

All across the board, the signs are pointing to a backward slide and the tame way the Bulls succumbed in Toulouse has only underlined it further. White spoke from the outset about the difficulty of winning in Toulouse and it has raised the concern that the team lost the game before they took the field.

In fact, while decisions went against them, they hardly fired a shot on attack against a very average Toulouse side on Sunday.

The sudden fall of Tuks - a feeder side for the Bulls - from Varsity Cup champions to being relegated within a year hasn’t helped either.

The Bulls' next two games are against Zebre and Leinster and they currently sit seventh on the log. They will need at least one, perhaps two victories to qualify for the URC playoffs.

In the Currie Cup Griquas visit Loftus Versfeld this weekend fresh from their big win over DHL Western Province. While the Bulls may well play several of their URC stars, it will be another tough test against a team that has gained momentum after their opening loss.

White was more philosophical after the loss on Sunday, saying he didn’t believe that it would be so difficult to change.

PHILOSPHICAL DEBATE

“All I do is read about the 10 losses, and yes, it is something that you have to change – and it will change, there is no doubt in my mind,” he said.

“When you enter a competition and you win the first eight games and lose the next eight and make the playoffs, you have exactly the same amount of chances that the team who won 16 games in a row have.

“This is a difficult competition and we are out of this one now, but we’ve just got to keep working until we can turn the corner on those other ones.

“Anyone can add up however many you want to, how many consecutive whatever – it’s irrelevant. The bottom line is that we’ve got to make these playoffs, and that’s our main goal now. It’s not about how many we’ve lost, how many we’ve won, how many we should’ve and could’ve won. We’ve got to make sure we keep working hard to make the playoffs of all the competitions we’ve got left.”

The Bulls know what their task is ahead of them. They also know they are the masters of their own destiny. They can stop the slide, but they will first need to pinpoint where it went wrong.

And find their way back to a winning habit.