Coastal franchises condemned to be Super Rugby’s forever 'nearly men'

The cancellation of the scheduled final game in Vodacom Super Rugby will mean King’s Park will be enshrouded in silence on Saturday evening, but it will be no more silent than when the stadium was packed to capacity and bore witness to the competition’s most dramatic moment on South African soil.

Although the interest in the game led to traffic jams around the stadium before kick-off that saw some of the Sharks players and coaches arrive late and feeling panicky, and the atmosphere was so intense the press box felt almost claustrophobic, you could have heard a pin drop when the Bulls’ Bryan Habana ran through a hole in the home defence that broke so many hearts.

It was 2007. It was the first-ever Super Rugby final on South African soil. The sell-out signs had gone up almost as the ticket offices opened. Being the first home decider in 12 years of trying, with two local teams contesting it to ensure a first-ever South African winner, it was a rare event that everyone wanted to be at.

Moments before Habana scored the last gasp try that enabled the Bulls to win it with the conversion, the Sharks coaches Dick Muir and John Plumtree were very happy they were there. In fact, they were elated. Albert van den Berg, the substitute lock, had just scored a try that had Sharks fans, including the coaches, thinking they had sewn up a game they did edge most of the way.

TOUCHING THE MONEY

Muir related afterwards how he and Plumtree hugged each other and one of them said “I can’t believe we’ve just won the Super 14.”

“It really was a case of us touching the money and bringing back luck,” said Muir in an interview more than a decade later.

It was, because then two things happened. First there was a botch-up of classic proportions when it came to the conversion kick. Percy Montgomery, the Sharks’ ace goalkicking metronome, had been replaced by that late stage of the game. But Butch James, the incumbent Springbok flyhalf of the time and destined to be a World Cup winner later that year, was still on the field.

So AJ Venter, who was leading the Sharks at that moment because John Smit was also off the field, felt a little bit of disquiet when the young and eager Frans Steyn rushed eagerly up to take the conversion. It was a regulation kick, not right in front, but it should have been kickable.

“I remember thinking it wasn’t right but here was this young kid, so eager, so ready to make a contribution, and I regrettably just never had the heart to intervene and stop him from taking the kick. I just couldn’t do that,” related Venter when asked to look back at that moment in more recent times.

History reflects that Steyn not only rushed the kick, which meant there was more time for the Bulls to play after the restart than if he took his time about it, he also missed it. Which meant the Bulls could still win as they trailed by six points and not the eight that would have been the deficit had the flags been raised.

BULLS HAD EXPERIENCE AT PULLING OFF MIRACLES

That was the cue for the second thing to happen, which was Bulls coach Heyneke Meyer, who had already seen his team achieve the impossible when they scored nearly a hundred points, which was close to the target they'd been set in order to secure a home semifinal in their final league game against the Reds, animatedly telling his troops they could still win it.

And maybe there was a third and fourth thing too: In the mists of time, the details get forgotten, but referee Steve Walsh did miss an awful lot in the final sequence of play that led to the Habana try. The Sharks were also again complicit in their own downfall by not kicking the ball to touch when they could have, which would have ended the game.

There are some who still see that Habana try as a seismic moment in South African rugby that continued to reverberate years later when Meyer, on the basis of being the first local coach to win Super Rugby, was appointed as Bok coach in 2012. Had Muir’s Sharks won it, he might even have been the Bok coach the following year, 2008, and not Peter de Villiers.

We will never know the answers to that speculation, but what we do know is that the 2007 final was the best example of the role that both the Sharks and the team they would have been playing in the Unlocked finale, the Stormers, have played through the 25-year era that ends this weekend. That of being Super Rugby’s ‘Nearly Men’.

THE SUPER 12 WAS WHAT WORKED

It started for the Sharks in the first season of the competition, when the professional age started with the Super 12, when they lost the inaugural final to a star-studded Auckland team. The Super 12 was the best form of the competition and when people talk about there being a lot wrong with Super Rugby, they are forgetting how good it was when it first started.

The Super 12, with just 12 teams competing, 11 games played in the league phase by all teams, and which started in March and completed at the end of May, was an exciting product that it would have been hard to get tired of.

But the organisers eventually bowed to the pressure applied by Australia and South Africa, who for different reasons needed additional franchises to be included. When it morphed to the Super 14 in 2006, it was the start of a trend that led to the dilution of the strength of the Australian challenge, in particular, too many games and a conference format that was hard to understand.

ORLANDO STADIUM WAS THE CLOSEST THE STORMERS CAME

Like the Sharks, the Stormers never got to win the competition, and they only played in one final, that being the epic Orlando Stadium decider against the Bulls. It was World Cup year, and Pieter Rossouw, the former Stormers wing who ended up as assistant coach at the Bulls, remembers warning his counterpart in the Stormers set-up, Robbie Fleck, that when the game started the noise from the vuvuzelas would drown everything out.

“I told him that the Stormers players wouldn’t be able to hear lineout calls, they wouldn’t be able to talk to each other from any kind of distance, that it would be way out of their comfort zone,” recalled Rossouw this week.

“We had had a taste of it the week before when we played our semifinal in Soweto against the Crusaders. So we were forewarned, and it probably helped us in that game. Because we also had a very settled team, with some combinations having played together for many years, we probably had an advantage there too.

“We won the game because of a great line that Francois Hougaard, playing wing that day, ran on a planned move. It was very satisfying from a Bulls’ viewpoint, but more than that it was a wonderful occasion, a real unifying moment for South Africa, with the rugby fans coming to Soweto and mixing with local people who spread out welcoming arms for them.”

NO TROPHY BUT THE ‘MEN IN BLACK’ SEASON WAS AWESOME

It was indeed a memorable day, and Rossouw was right about the noise too. He would have been used to a different kind of noise, crowd noise, from his playing days, when he was part of one of the most memorable two months in South African Super Rugby history - the latter part of the 1999 ‘Men in Black’ Stormers campaign.

The Stormers decided to wear black that year and they revolved a highly successful marketing campaign around their changed identity.

That was the year that Bobby Skinstad dazzled before the unfortunate injury that quite possibly robbed the Stormers of the trophy. Although Rossouw says it is difficult to say, the Stormers did lose a lot of oomph after Skinstad’s injury.

The No 8 was the X-factor that made the Stormers backs, where the likes of Rossouw, Fleck, Breyton Paulse and Andy Marinos were so effective, look like such a potent attacking unit.

After the Stormers returned from their overseas tour at the end of the first half of the competition, they had an unbroken sequence of games at home - and Newlands was full or nearly full for almost every one of them. It was a time of big parties in Cape Town, and it was the Stormers that drove the energy and the vibe.

THE STRIKE THAT TOOK THE PLAYERS BY SURPRISE

Alas for them though, the story didn’t have a happy ending. And it started to go pear-shaped on the morning of the home semifinal against the Highlanders.

“I woke up on the morning of that game to my roommate Toks van der Linde asking me if I knew what we were going to be doing that day,” recalls Rossouw.

“I said to him sure, what a question, we are playing in a Super Rugby semifinal. Toks responded that no, that was not it. We were going to be going on strike. Corne Krige, the captain, and Andy Marinos had been negotiating with the authorities about a bonus if we won Super Rugby. Most of the team weren’t that aware of it, we weren’t involved.

“But on the morning of the game, the Weekend Argus ran a front-page story that said we were unhappy and we were going to strike. That was a terrible story and it was wrong. We had no intention of doing any such thing. It put a bad taste in the mouths of the fans, and we felt it when we arrived at Newlands.”

In Rossouw’s view, the Highlanders were just so good in that semifinal that they would have won regardless of whether the strike story had appeared or even if Skinstad was still fit to lead the Stormers. But it did add to the pall of gloom that descended on Newlands after that game, one that possibly impacted on the Springbok World Cup year that followed.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PLAYING DECIDING GAMES AT HOME

It wasn’t until 2004 that the Stormers were in another semifinal, this time under the coaching of Gert Smal. It was a strong year for the Stormers, headlined perhaps by their 50-point win over a strong Blues team in Auckland (the Blues were the reigning champions at the time), but unfortunately for them, it was a year where they needed to finish in the top two to stand any chance of winning the trophy.

That was because the Stormers toured at the end of the league phase of the competition, and then had to return home to host one final league game before getting on the plane to fly all the way back to New Zealand to play the Crusaders. It was never a realistic ask.

Neither was it a realistic ask for the Sharks in 2012 when they defied the odds to beat the Reds in Brisbane then fly back to Cape Town to beat the Stormers before flying to Hamilton for the final against the Chiefs. The win at Newlands, considering the travel, was the stuff of miracles, but the final flight, the one to the decider, was always going to be a bridge too far.

And that was arguably also the case in 2001, when Mark Andrews’ team toured late before flying back to contest a final against the Brumbies in Canberra. Like the Chiefs final 11 years later, the game was never close.

NEWLANDS CHOKERS

On balance, the Sharks appeared in more finals and semifinals than the Stormers did, with the Stormers’ purple patch between 2010 and 2012, one of those seasons even topping the overall log, coinciding with the assumption of the ‘chokers’ tag that arose out of their apparent inability to win home playoff games.

The only playoff game they ever did win in Super Rugby was the 2010 semifinal against the Waratahs that got them into the Soweto final.

That was the closest they ever came to winning the competition, but like the Sharks three years earlier, it was the Bulls who condemned them to being ‘Nearly Men’. And with Super Rugby now seemingly consigned to the history books forever, at least from a South African viewpoint, it is ‘Nearly Men’ that both franchises will remain.