New era or new errors?
Jason Holland’s Super Rugby head coaching debut could hardly have gone much worse.
The 47-year-old made the step up from assistant coach to the top job at the Hurricanes when John Plumtree was cherry-picked for the All Blacks in late December, but oversaw a 27-0 drubbing at the hands of the Stormers in Cape Town yesterday in his first regular season game in charge.
It was the first time since round one of the 1999 season – an
11-0 loss to the Reds – that the Hurricanes have been kept scoreless.
Such a scoreline could lead to questions about the coach, or the franchise that couldn’t hold on to Beauden Barrett (not that he would’ve been playing yesterday), or the All Blacks taking a head coach so deep into the preseason, but much of the Hurricanes’ loss was down to individual errors.
They conceded 17 turnovers and 12 penalties in the match. At one point in the first half, referee Jaco Peyper delivered a general warning to Hurricanes captain TJ Perenara, saying ‘‘it’s a lot of clear penalties, I don’t even have to think about it’’.
Two of those penalties in the first 40 minutes allowed the Stormers to kick deep into the Hurricanes’ 22, where their big forward pack took over, asserting their dominance and helping set up their first two tries.
The Stormers’ other two tries came off a wayward pass from No
8 Gareth Evans and an intercept from replacement halfback Jamie
Booth. ‘‘Most of the things out there today are on us,’’ Evans said.
‘‘The mistakes we made really let the Stormers into the game. the first two tries were from penalties, the third was an individual mistake and the fourth was an intercept. It’s things I think we can fix.’’
In and around the tryscoring mistakes were plenty of dropped balls.
The Hurricanes rarely got past five phases in a first half which ended with them trailing the Stormers 19-0.
Holland said that was a major reason behind why they could not get into the game.
‘‘We knew early in the game
Jason Holland we would have to suck it up and carry it a bit with the bodies they had there, but I don’t think we went past three or four phases in that first half which meant that their big boys could line us up and didn’t have to work for long periods of time, which was a massive part of what we wanted to do.
‘‘We knew we had to suck it up for the first 20, but we thought it would open up if we put them through some phases.
‘‘Generally if you give the ball away after two or three phases, you’re not going to apply much pressure,’’ Holland said.
The second half saw Billy Proctor and Vaea Fifita both sent to the sin bin for a professional foul and high shot respectively.
While Holland was ‘‘really disappointed’’ with how his side played, he wouldn’t be hitting the panic button and backed his players to bounce back in the coming weeks, starting against the Jaguares in Buenos Aires next Sunday.
‘‘I know the group of players that we’ve got and I know the potential they have, I see it every day.
‘‘We’re obviously disappointed in what we did today and how the boys went about their business, and they’ll be disappointed themselves, but I know the potential in this group and I’m sure when you’re talking to me in three or four weeks it will be a different story.
‘‘We’ve had one bad, rusty performance and we’ll work hard to get better there.’’