The Toyota Cheetahs travelled to Neslpruit and put the final jigsaw for the Carling Currie Cup semifinals in place but, with the Vodacom United Rugby Championship heading down the track towards us, there was as much focus in round 10 on what happened in Durban and Kimberley.
The Vodacom Bulls will host the Hollywoodbets Sharks in the late semi on Saturday, with the other semi being played down the M1 and N1 at Emirates Airlines Park between the Fidelity ADT Lions and the Cheetahs on the same day. The Lions, who are likely to field a virtual URC team in the game, will be heavily favoured, but it is less easy to pick a winner at Loftus.
Part of the reason for that is that we don’t know what the selection policy will be for the respective unions. The reason the Lions are favourites in Johannesburg is because they’ve been playing with their URC players for a while. There is clearly an intention on their part to try and replicate the sequence of success that started for them with a Currie Cup title in 2015 that was followed by appearances in three consecutive Super Rugby finals from 2016 to 2018.
The Hollywoodbets Sharks and the Vodacom Bulls play out a thriller in tricky conditions 🔥
— SuperSport Rugby (@SSRugby) September 8, 2024
Next week's #CarlingCurrieCup semi-final is going to be good 😏 pic.twitter.com/Z99PThoAOr
With the other unions, there appears to have been recognition that the Currie Cup has been much watered down since 2015, and for the Sharks in particular, the domestic season was used to spread the selection net. For much of their campaign, they relied on what was effectively an age-group team bolstered by a few experienced campaigners like flyhalf Lionel Cronje and lock Reniel Hugo.
That team was coached really well by the director of youth rugby at the Sharks, the former Springbok wing JP Pietersen, but the plan was always for John Plumtree’s URC group to take over from round 8, with the final Currie Cup games effectively being used as warm-up fixtures for the new URC season.
That plan has remained in place, although the Sharks had much less of a URC look to them when they faced the Bulls in their final Currie Cup league match played in wet conditions on Sunday than their opponents did.
SHARKS’ CULTURE HAS COME RIGHT
The Sharks dug deep to come from behind and win 24-18, but given that for most of the Bulls players this was their first game of a new season, while many of the Sharks players selected for Sunday’s game have played in the Currie Cup, the result was less important than the further confirmation provided by the young Sharks that there has been a culture change in Durban.
Since Plumtree’s arrival, there has been much greater alignment between head coach and the contracting - Plumtree is in effect the man in charge of that whereas Sean Everitt wasn’t - and that is paying off, but it was the team culture that the former All Black assistant coach considered his biggest work on.
He would have had considerable help from Pietersen during the earlier part of the Currie Cup season of course, not to mention the fine captaincy skills of Nick Hatton, who did not play against the Bulls. But what Plumtree has been working on started to come through in the second half of last season, with the biggest advertisement of that culture change coming when the Sharks showed such spirit in winning a close EPCR Challenge Cup semifinal against Clermont in London.
There were elements of that in the game against the Bulls, where the Sharks carried on what was started when they turned their domestic season around with a win over the Lions in Johannesburg and which has seen them go through the subsequent part of the season unbeaten. The exciting draw with the Airlink Pumas in Nelspruit was effectively their only blemish, and that was a qualified one as they came back from a big deficit to nearly win the game.
The Pumas' loss to the Cheetahs in the final round on their home ground means there will be no smaller union representation in the Currie Cup final for the first time in three seasons, with the Cheetahs carrying the flag heading into the semis of the non-URC franchise unions.
CONTEXT TO BULLS AND WP LOSSES
Talking of URC franchise unions, not too much should be read into the weekend performances of the Bulls and for that matter, DHL Western Province. Both sides were loaded with URC players, but for Jake White and John Dobson, the objective would just have been for those players to get some game time under their belts and get through the 80 minutes unscathed ahead of the URC kick-off in three weeks time.
In that sense, Dobson achieved his objective even though his team lost in the dying minutes in Kimberley. He would have been pleased that, for instance, the hulking figure of JD Schickerling was back in WP colours for the first time in three years after returning from his stint in Japan and celebrated his 50th cap by completing 80 minutes. There were no other injuries to speak of.
White, though, might have a few injuries, in particular to Harold Vorster, who had to be taken to hospital.
It will be interesting to see if the Bulls treat Saturday’s game as a URC warmup, in which case the URC players will play, or whether they will return to the side that is effectively the alternative URC/Investec Champions Cup team that propelled them to first place in the log until the URC loaded Lions beat them last week.
It is a bit of a catch-22 for both White and Plumtree in the sense that while it feels right to reward the players who have played most of the Currie Cup, they both do need to get playing time into their top players’ legs ahead of the URC. There again, if they make the decider, that game will be played just one week before the URC kick-off and if they play all out in the final, it might compromise their challenge in the URC.
Fortunately, both unions do have plenty of depth, so maybe they can mix and match selections but it is an indicator that playing the Currie Cup in what should effectively be the South African off-season may be counter-productive for the URC-represented unions.
ROUND 10 CARLING CURRIE CUP RESULTS
Suzuki Griquas 37 DHL Western Province 29
Fidelity ADT Lions 62 Novavit Griffons 5
Airlink Pumas 14 Toyota Cheetahs 41
Hollywoodbets Sharks XV 24 Vodacom Bulls 18
Carling Currie Cup semifinals (both Saturday 14th September)
Fidelity ADT Lions v Toyota Cheetahs (Johannesburg, 14.30)
Vodacom Bulls v Hollywoodbets Sharks (Pretoria, 17.15)