Jury out over Super Rugby coaches’ process emphasis
The 2018 Super Rugby season will be remembered as an underwhelming one for South African teams, but judging from what local coaches have been saying in the media, relief will soon be at hand. The year of no excuses will be 2019.
Witness Stormers assistant coach Paul Feeney, who spoke of 2019 — the culmination of what he views as a three-year plan — as the one in which the Stormers’ coaches should face judgment.
“Year one is about learning to work together and your planning in terms of who you’re contracting and where your holes are,” said Feeney. “Year two you want to build on it a bit and year three you should be all guns blazing. That’s how we’ve gone about it.”
So the good news for Stormers’ fans is that their team will be “all guns blazing” in 2019. There won’t be any excuses. Assuming that all the coaches retain their positions beyond this season, it will be a similar story for the Sharks.
Robert du Preez has also made reference to a three-year plan. Like Robbie Fleck’s group, his is also just completing the second year of a three-season plan, and on that basis there is assumed to be a reasonable argument for patience from the public, media and other interested parties.
With John Mitchell just completing his first season with the Bulls and having had to work from a very low base at a union that has resembled an airport departures hall over the past few years, only the Lions can claim they are more results driven than process driven.
The season has reflected the juncture the franchises are in. The Lions may have a new coach but at least he was part of the group headed by his predecessor and the systems that were put in place years ago are still functioning.
That is why, while the Lions have regressed in terms of results, they still look likely conference winners and remain SA’s best bet for silverware.
But it sometimes does feel as if local franchises are in a perennial rebuilding phase and all the talk of processes might partly explain the sparsely populated stadiums at local Super Rugby matches.
Sometimes when I hear coaches rabbiting on about processes, and it happens a lot at all levels, I want to shout out: “Hey, shouldn’t the fans get half-price admission until such time as you consider the process to be complete?”
Beyond that cynicism though there should be acknowledgement that what is being said is not gobbledygook.
When Kepler Wessels captained the Proteas at the beginning of the post-isolation era he explained inconsistent performances away by saying that when a team is new inconsistency comes with the territory. It is the same with Super Rugby and it may explain why the Sharks, Bulls and Stormers have experienced such patchy seasons. But the problem with Super Rugby is that modern realities — money and the lure of foreign currency — pose huge challenges to any long-term plan. The outflow of players to foreign clubs makes it difficult to pull off the successful building process that the Brumbies, for instance. managed in the early part of past decade.
It’s rare now for combinations to stay together season after season, as was the case then with the Brumbies and Crusaders.
That the Lions managed it for several years is another reason they’ve been the most successful local team.
The Sharks’ backline attack has improved, the Bulls’ playing template has been revolutionised by Mitchell and the Stormers can gain from something by just taking a step back and recommitting themselves to the core skills development that allowed them to make huge progress, which has subsequently floundered, at the start of 2017.
The bottom line though is that the playing groups need to be kept together or the “learnings”, to borrow from modern coaching lingo, will all be in vain.
Moreover, the attrition rate in Super Rugby is such that it is nigh impossible to foresee a South African franchise winning the competition without having developed enough depth to make up two quality teams.
Players not playing regularly in the first-choice team are always the most susceptible to the lure of greener pastures, so at a time when South African rugby is so cash strapped, that is the biggest challenge.
Hopefully, the coaches who are setting up 2019 as the culmination of their plan know they have good financial backing from their unions. If not, all the current talk will just amount to empty promises.