SA rugby is now reaping benefits of post lockdown focus

The Kick Off 2021 preparation for the Rainbow Cup ended at the weekend with a message that came through loud and clear - all the talk last August and September about a potential surge in the skill levels of South African players wasn’t just wishful thinking.

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Cast your mind back to the interviews that were done before South Africa’s return to play season began in the last week of September. Several players and coaches spoke about how the lockdown conditions, and the protocols that had to be observed at training for a couple of months immediately post lockdown, might just have a positive impact.

The references were to the amount of time players spent working on core and basic skills during the period that contact and full training wasn’t allowed. That amounted to a couple of months of focus on ball skills. From memory an interview with DHL Stormers lock Salmaan Moerat stands out - he told us that he had never worked so much in his rugby life on basic skills and he predicted it would have a positive impact on the rugby that would be produced when rugby returned.

The hoped-for revolution didn’t happen in the Vodacom Super Rugby Unlocked competition or in the Carling Currie Cup. There might have been several reasons for that. The conservative mindsets of coaches who came back from the hiatus in survival mode was definitely one of them. The box kicking and set-piece/mauling extravaganza that we saw in the Currie Cup didn’t showcase any skill improvements just because the games never lent themselves to it.

Not that it was just the mindset that prevented the showcasing of skills. The weather encountered in rugby played over the summer months in South Africa for the first time certainly didn’t help. Neither did the whole Covid experience, with teams being unable to train for long periods as they awaited results of testing or went into quarantine because of positive tests for the virus.

The testing is less frequent now. It is happening around every 10 days now as opposed to every couple of days previously. The games in the Kick Off series were also spread out sufficiently to get proper preparation in. There were 10 days between the first three rounds of games, with only the last weekend being played the usual seven days after the previous round of matches.

Whatever the reason though for the failure to showcase the improvement in skills between the end of September and the Currie Cup final at the end of January, it is happening now. And in the King’s Park game between the Cell C Sharks and the Vodacom Bulls evidence was provided that wet weather shouldn’t be an excuse to not be adventurous either.

SKILLS RIDICULOUSLY GOOD AT WET KING'S PARK

Given the wet conditions, the handling skills shown in that game bordered on the ridiculous they were so good. Maybe we’d have expected that in the past from New Zealand teams, but not local teams. The game did slow down later but it was frenetic for most of the first half and yet that fast tempo didn’t lead to the slew of errors we’d have anticipated in the past.

Off-loads and elaborate passes out of the back of the hand tended to stick even in the wet weather, and that says something. It says there is evolution, that South African players may be evolving towards being able to play a brand of rugby we thought was beyond them before.

Neither was it just the Sharks, who won the game handsomely against a Bulls team that was a long way less approximating full strength than the home side was, who were alone in dazzling on Friday night. The try the Bulls scored through captain Nizaam Carr was sublime too, and the visitors certainly contributed to the fast paced, entertaining spectacle.

Even on a dry day the rugby produced would have been praiseworthy, and the Stormers and Lions managed to emulate the other game between Rainbow Cup franchises at Cape Town Stadium the next day.

VAN REENEN A REVELATION FOR STORMERS

Newcomer Abner van Reenen was a revelation at flyhalf for the Stormers, who produced a remarkably similar result to what their coastal rivals from Durban, who happen to also be their first opponents in the Rainbow Cup on 24 April, did the night before. All the players in the Kick Off 2021 series appeared to have been given licence to thrill, and even debutants like Van Reenen embraced it with positive results.

The type of rugby played and the new players brought through and given their first opportunity of rugby at first class level will help the country’s Rainbow Cup challenge and completely vindicated SA national director of rugby Rassie Erasmus’ decision to shorten the off-season. Most of the first-choice players were rested for the first three weeks of the series anyway.

When Erasmus first announced that the local teams would be facing off against each other over a period of a month it attracted a lot of understandable negative comment. The last Currie Cup season was not a memorable one, no one was looking forward to more of the same.

Full marks to Erasmus then for the directive he sent out to quicken up the game so that the players could get fit and become adjusted to a higher tempo of play, something that could be to their advantage in the Rainbow Cup and beyond that the PRO16. The refereeing adjustments that encouraged more ball in play time was another big step forward.

STAND BY FOR A PROPER GROWTH SPURT

The upshot is that South African rugby appears to be in a much better place now than it appeared to be at the end of the Currie Cup. Note that the word ‘appears’ is the operative one in that sentence. We will only really know how good the South African teams are once they start playing foreign opposition. Stepping into the northern hemisphere is a step into the unknown for all of them.

But the improvement in the ball handling and other core, basic skills that would have been focused on when the country came back from lockdown in the middle of last year has been obvious. It took a while, but what was said in all those zoom interviews conducted at the time is not a load of hooey. A proper growth spurt for SA rugby in the next couple of months could be coming.

WEEKEND RESULTS

Cell C Sharks 45 Vodacom Bulls 12

Tafel Lager Griquas 23 New Nation Pumas 22

DHL Stormers 44 Emirates Lions 12

Toyota Cheetahs 71 Eastern Province Elephants 12