Timing of Bok tour selections diluted Currie Cup final
Coach says poor lineout performance cost team dearly in loss to Sharks in Currie Cup final
Western Province coach John Dobson had to bite his lip when talking after Saturday’s Currie Cup final about the mood in the losing change room.
The truth was the change room was half empty because seven members of his run-on team were already on their way to Cape Town International Airport to catch the Springbok flight to London.
While the Sharks deserved their win in a final that was played in conditions that perhaps conspired in their favour as the slow, stop-start nature of the game didn’t expose their staying ability at forward, it would be naive to think that the selections, and the logistics of the Bok departure, did not affect the result.
The squad was only announced to the public on Saturday night after the game, but of course the players already knew who was going. The logistics of getting them to the airport straight after the game would have been impossible otherwise.
The Sharks Boks, for instance, would have had to be packed for London when they left Durban.
Dobson had confided in me earlier in the week that the players all knew who was going
and that some of the key Sharks players, such as the Du Preez brothers and Akker van der Merwe, weren’t part of Rassie Erasmus’s squad.
I told him that was bad news for him, and he agreed.
The Sharks went to Cape Town with players who had a point to prove and who knew they could play to the limit of their physical and mental capacity as they didn’t have another game to play in 2018.
Half the WP team had one foot on the plane and the firsttimers in the Bok squad had particularly good reason to perhaps be focused more on what would come after the game than the game itself.
Some will say the players are all professionals and are paid to perform for whatever team they run out for. Theoretically that would be correct. But in reality players are human, and former Sharks coach John Plumtree will tell you that managing the Boks in your team heading into a Currie Cup play-off phase is a science that can determine whether you triumph or fail.
Plumtree was both burned and boosted in his time by the mood of the Boks in his squad. In 2008, after a disastrous Bok campaign in that year’s TriNations, his national players returned to the provincial squad angry and with a point to prove. They did just that, and the Sharks broke a 12-year Currie Cup drought by beating the Blue Bulls in the final.
A year later, after the Boks had won the series against the British and Irish Lions and swept through to the TriNations title, the Boks returned to the Sharks complacent, and the Sharks were upset in a home semifinal by the Cheetahs, who did not have many national players.
Erasmus’s continued exclusion of hooker Van der Merwe in favour of Schalk Brits is nothing short of idiotic. And I would say the same about JeanLuc du Preez. The other two Du Preez brothers are just good provincial players maybe Dan would be international quality if he retreaded to lock but JeanLuc is a special player. He belongs in the Bok group, and so does the Angry Warthog (Van der Merwe), who had good reason to come to Cape Town even angrier than usual and duly walked off with the Man of the Match award.
All four of the Sharks’ Boks who had reason to feel aggrieved at their omission played key roles in the win.
One of the men selected ahead of Van der Merwe, WP’s hooker Bongi Mbonambi, played a big role in his team’s demise with an inept performance in feeding the lineouts. Several other Boks in the WP team also didn’t produce the performances that got them selected.
Where were those players when on Sunday morning their provincial coach woke up feeling depressed as the reality set in that his team had effectively bottled it? They were already on the other side of the world, possibly landing in London at the very moment Dobson opened his eyes, ready for a new challenge and, unlike Dobson, able to leave their failure of the day before far behind.
The Twickenham game is now just six days away and it is difficult to imagine what alternative Erasmus had, but the situation didn’t help Dobson and it was disrespectful to the supposed showpiece game of the domestic season.
It was another nail drummed into the Currie Cup coffin.
Western Province coach John Dobson described his team’s performance in losing the Currie Cup final 17-12 to the Sharks as “the worst of the season” and a “car wreck”.
WP were well beaten despite the tight score‚ thanks mainly to the Sharks’ inability to round off several gilt-edged chances.
But the Durban side did enough to capture their eighth title against a team that was unbeaten before the final.
“It was far and away our worst performance of the season and the Sharks thoroughly deserved to win the match‚” Dobson said.
“But we have to look at facts and take out the emotion. If you are going to lose eight lineouts‚ you are going to make something like 40 more tackles.
“It’s very hard to defend turnovers. You are going backwards and they have the forward momentum.
“We never got any momentum and we never looked like scoring. The only time we looked vaguely like scoring was when wing Sergeal [Petersen] chased a kick and it bounced the only way possible for him not to score. It was a car wreck of a day,” Dobson said.
“I felt sad for the people that came to Newlands to see that spectacle we served up today.”
Dobson dismissed suggestions that his side mentally faltered after only scoring two tries in the play-offs after scoring freely in the pool stages. But he did admit that perhaps‚ despite saying they would not‚ the team veered from its vibrant play of the pool stages.
“I don’t think there is a mental aspect to it. If we had won a few more lineouts [in the final] we would be having a different conversation‚” Dobson said.
“A big accent the whole week was to stay true to ourselves and maybe there was an element of us losing our way.”
Dobson gambled by picking Damian Willemse at centre to accommodate Josh Stander at flyhalf. Stander was selected for his superior tactical kicking but he and Willemse had no positive impact on the game.
“We were poor in many positions and I’m not going to single out Josh Stander‚” Dobson said.
“There is not one player in the changeroom who thinks he had a good game. I admit Josh didn’t pay off and neither did Damian at centre.”
Most of the Springboks to tour Britain and France had to fly out of Cape Town at 9pm on Saturday. Players had to leave Newlands immediately to catch a flight to London. Dobson mused aloud whether this affected the players mentally.
Lock JD Schickerling‚ Petersen and centre Ruhan Nel were three uncapped WP players in the squad. They all knew before the final they were touring with the Boks.
The other aspect that weighed on Dobson was taking the Bok tour into consideration during the final.
“Hooker Bongi Mbonambi was pretty stuffed and when I asked him at halftime whether he could carry on‚ he took a while to answer‚ so I decided to pull him‚” he said.
“A big thing is that some guys were leaving the field to go straight on the Bok tour‚ and I don’t know how much of a factor that was.
“We spent a lot of time this week thinking about the mental impact on the new Boks. The guys had to leave Newlands at 6.15pm‚ so they couldn’t even stay for the trophy presentation.”