Blues at crossroads if history is not to repeat

Umaga heading same way as Lam and Kirwan unless side start winning

There is irony to be found in the fact that the Blues say the thing they crave is consistency when it is precisely the one quality a long-suffering fan base feel has been the club’s hallmark for the past 15 years.

A little like the French in their erratic prime throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Blues have been consistently inconsistent: they have become frighteningly predictable in the past decade, each season indistinguishable from the last in that they are all littered with games that should have been won and mistakes that could have been avoided interlaced with moments of brilliance.

The story hasn’t changed since Pat Lam took over as coach in 2009. The Blues haven’t been able to transform themselves into the champion club to which they aspire, they haven’t been able to produce teams that consistently make good decisions and regularly win, and they haven’t been able to convince anyone that they have the stable foundation they need to excel.

What’s added to the sense of the side being stuck in some unbreakable hold is that the respective reigns of the last three coaches have followed a remarkably similar pattern.

Lam was able to slowly trend in the right direction in his first two years, saw a major improvement in his third and then collapsed in his fourth.

John Kirwan came in and the same thing happened: the Blues stabilised in 2013, slightly improved in 2014 and collapsed in 2015. History is repeating with Tana Umaga.

The Blues finished 11th in his first year — a major improvement on 14th (second last) as they were in Kirwan’s last year and they finished ninth in

2017. But four games into his third year and Umaga surveys a landscape that looks much like the one Lam and Kirwan stared at after they had also initially made good progress.

The Blues have won just once in

2018 and are wallowing in 13th place. They played well in their loss to the Highlanders but lacked composure in the final quarter.

They were relentlessly poor against the Chiefs the following week, brave, controlled and determined when they beat the Lions, and flat, loose and lacking when well beaten by the Stormers.

Four contrasting performances which suggest the Blues are again on track to be a frustrating mix of good, bad and indifferent in 2018, and as a result, Umaga is at the same crossroads where Lam and Kirwan found themselves.

He’s had a couple of okay years — he has presided over moderate improvements and fixed many of the most glaring problems.

But what no one knows yet is whether one win from four is evidence the Blues have gone as far as they can under Umaga and are now going to implode the way they did under Lam and Kirwan, or whether it is a base from which they will push on, learn their lessons and start to click.

The next six weeks are going to be critical, for they have the potential to redefine the Blues and establish, beyond doubt that extending Umaga’s contract at the end of this campaign is the right thing to do.

What is currently a fairly dire situation could look entirely different by the middle of May if the Blues can crack the holy grail of performing consistently well.

And this is really what it all comes down to: is Umaga’s reign going to look like his predecessors’ with a sharp tail off after a promising start, or is he going to be the first coach in a decade to instil within the team the belief, confidence and ability to regularly win?

It’s a fascinating scenario, made more so by the fact that it’s simply impossible to guess from what the Blues have delivered so far in 2018 whether they have it within them to play with the required cohesion and mental strength to win the majority of their next six games.

Umaga, in announcing the team to play the Sharks, made it clear that he fully understands the specific challenge that lies ahead.

“We’ve trained well but we can’t give our opponents the sorts of starts we have given this season,” he said. “We are looking to be a lot more accurate, to protect our own ball much better, get a good platform up front and be more accurate in defence.

“We had one good game in South Africa but then let ourselves down. At this level of competition, we need to perform for 80 minutes and look to improve with every outing.”