If there is any consolation to be drawn for South Africans for the Vodacom Bulls’ heavy defeat to Leinster in Dublin the other night, it is that the wakeup call was for the Pretoria side and other local Vodacom United Championship teams and not the Springboks.
Bulls director of rugby Jake White was right to talk up his team’s game at the RDS Arena as a test match. To win, the Bulls needed to produce a test match type performance with international rugby intensity. Which they did for long passages of the first half before the Leinster class and power started to tell, not to mention some rather odd referee and TMO calls against the visitors, something that you have to accept as just coming with the territory when playing away.
To me it wasn’t a 47-14 game. Once Leinster put daylight between the scores, it was a case of the Bulls being deflated and the hosts having the momentum they capitalised on. These things happen.
There is on the evidence of the Dublin game a 20 point chasm between the teams. The DHL Stormers will contest this theory when they host Leinster in a URC game in late April, but there probably is a 20 point gap between Leinster and all the South African URC teams. Certainly when you go to Dublin to play them.
BULLS WITH OVERSEAS STARS WOULD MATCH LEINSTER
That though isn’t a reason to panic or be concerned, and it may be the exact opposite. While White’s team were playing a shadow test team, and not just any test team either, one that was No 1 in the world for most of last year and is now comfortably at No 2 behind the Boks, the Irish side wasn’t playing a team representative of South Africa’s international rugby strength.
And they won’t be when they play the Stormers in Cape Town in a few weeks either. Gone are the days when a Bok team will be built mostly around one province or franchise like Kitch Chrisite’s 1995 World Cup winning side was.
It won’t happen just because so many of South Africa’s top players are overseas. To illustrate my point let me draw up a Bulls team to what it could look like if all the players who once played for them who are now campaigning overseas were still based in Pretoria.
Bulls team: Willie le Roux, Kurtley Arendse, Jesse Kriel, Jan Serfontein, Canan Moodie, Handre Pollard, Ivan van Zyl, Marcel Coetzee, Elrigh Louw, Marco van Staden, Lood de Jager, RG Snyman, Trevor Nyakane, Johan Grobbelaar, Pierre Schoeman.
Okay, I know that Schoeman is Scotland qualified now, but he did initially leave for the same reasons the other players did. And anyway, Leinster have an ‘Irish’ player who qualified for them after learning his rugby elsewhere in former Highlanders wing James Lowe, and they also have a Bok World Cup winning coach in their back room staff and another Bok in Jason Jenkins on their books, so you can allow me a bit of license with my selection.
I feel like there’s a blindside flank that could challenge Louw for the No 7 jersey somewhere that I’ve overlooked, but few will argue that the above isn’t a strong enough team to not only beat Leinster but probably also walk away with the Investec Champions Cup. When you look at that team, you understand why White spends so much time lamenting the fact that so many of the A list players are playing overseas.
POSITIVE IS THE WIDENING OF RESOURCE POOL
It would make a huge difference to the South African teams in their bid to break through the barrier and win the top European competition if the marquee stars currently campaigning overseas were available to them. Funnily enough the Stormers never won anything when they had A list stars playing for them, and have done much better since their departure, but they could also have more of an “international look” if the likes of Pieter-Steph du Toit, Siya Kolisi, Damian de Allende and Cheslin Kolbe were still playing for them.
But if this recognition of the impact of the so-called exodus comes across as a negative, maybe it isn’t. Leinster were too good for the Bulls last Friday, but many of the Bulls players do have experience of winning at the RDS Arena. They did it in a semifinal two years ago. In that game Leinster weren’t quite at full strength and neither were they when the Stormers drew with them in a wet weather game last March.
The point is though that the young players who might not otherwise get opportunities if the Galatico World Cup winners were playing locally are being fast tracked and are proving themselves worthy. It expands the resource pool that the Bok coaches have to select from that big name players playing overseas creates opportunities for home based players.
Indeed, it might not be a coincidence that the local franchise that has struggled the most in the URC this year is the one that banks heavily on its Boks. Since the Sharks have been playing at full strength they’ve beaten Ulster and Edinburgh successively and suddenly look like they have momentum.
That should be no surprise, but what happens to the Sharks when the Boks aren’t there? Their coach John Plumtree has bemoaned their lack of depth, and that does get exposed when the Boks aren’t there, a good example being their comprehensive defeat to the Emirates Lions in Johannesburg a month ago.
WHEN YOUNGSTERS MATURE THE GAP WILL CLOSE
If Manie Libbok gets injured or gets to miss a few games for the Stormers because he is with the Boks, the Cape franchise is well covered in the form of Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu or Jurie Matthee, both of whom are young but have a good few URC caps between them. Likewise, the Bulls have Devon Williams when Willie le Roux isn’t there and a host of young loose-forwards such as Cameron Hanekom when Coetzee isn’t there.
The good off-season business that White did has of course played a big role in putting the Bulls on the path to improvement, but it is also true that some of his younger players are now maturing. It is the same at the Stormers. Suleiman Hartzenberg is young and is not a big name now but will be shortly. Although they lost badly at the weekend, the Lions’ youth policy is paying off.
The Boks don’t have a team like Leinster to draw on as a shadow international side but then they’ve won the last two World Cups so do they need one? They might be better off in their quest for sustained global domination having the widespread of players that get top quality exposure, and get to play against quasi-international sides like the Bulls did a few days ago, with things as they are now. As the youngsters mature, the gap Leinster has will be closed.