When to rest players and when not to rest them
When the Sharks team for the United Rugby Championship (URC) derby against the Stormers in Durban was announced, the visiting team’s noses were rightly put out of joint.
This is supposed to be the time that the Springboks are given off as per the national resting protocols.
The Bulls opted to give their World Cup-winning Boks their mandatory five weeks off earlier, which was why the return of Canan Moodie and Kurt-Lee Arendse against the Lions was expected. By contrast, Ox Nche and Jaden Hendrikse have been fully involved since returning from the three weeks rest after the World Cup. So the Stormers had reason to expect them not to be playing.
Yet there was no cheating on the part of the Sharks. Their chances of getting anything out of the URC season are virtually zero and they can do without Nche and Hendrikse in coming month. For the Sharks, the Challenge Cup, which is their only possible route into next season’s edition of the elite Champions Cup, now has to be the priority.
And there is enough time before their round of 16 game in early April for Nche and Hendrikse, and the injured Eben Etzebeth for that matter, to get in their five weeks of mandatory rest. Working the resting period due to those players around the coastal derby was actually a sign of the respect the Sharks have for the Stormers. They wanted a statement victory against a big team on a day that coincided with the Sharks Festival which was staged to attract a large crowd.
VIBRANT ATMOSPHERE
It worked for the Sharks, with 30,000 turning up for a game played in a vibrant atmosphere even though it took a long time for the home crowd to be heard due to the early dominance of the visitors. With the mission being to sell themselves to their public, it was important for the Sharks to be as near to full strength as possible.
Stormers coach John Dobson was also right to question the haphazard nature of the resting directive. The Durban game was an important one for the Stormers from a URC log perspective and they found themselves going into it without key players against a team expected to be similarly understrength but wasn’t.
Nche and Hendrikse are both influential enough players to require a degree of special preparation from their opponents. So Neethling Fouche, the Stormers tighthead prop who was Nche’s direct opponent in the scrums, spent Friday night doing some extra unexpected late cramming. The plans that had been set during the week had to be changed.
As it turned out, Fouche dealt with the challenge as if it was no real obstacle, and he made a statement performance. And the Stormers made a statement performance around their depth, particularly in the one area where the Sharks are particularly weak and have recruited ineptly over a long time — flyhalf.
While the inexperienced but prodigiously promising Jurie Matthee, in tandem with the man many expect to be the next Bok flyhalf great, Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, were proving masterful in the key 10/12 decision making axis for the Stormers, the Sharks flyhalf Curwin Bosch challenged strongly to be the Stormers’ most valuable player.
Not only did the Stormers get massive go forward by running at Bosch, the Sharks pivot also denied his team any possible attacking momentum by standing in the pocket. Not that it was anything new. The Sharks’ attack was far more potent when the more direct Siya Masuku came on to play 10.
PENNY DROPPING
If the game provided the final confirmation to the Sharks that they need to move on from Bosch it’s a case of the penny dropping about three seasons later than it should have. In defence of the various Sharks coaches who have tried to coach Bosch’s flaws out of him, there is enough natural talent there to justify the effort — but there’s a limit to how much you can do before accepting defeat.
If it took the performances of the young Stormers’ playmakers to expose the futility of the Sharks’ investment in Bosch, maybe it was a good thing the Stormers didn’t go to Durban at full strength. Having established Boks Manie Libbok and Damian Willemse bossing the Sharks would have been expected and not have had the same impact as a message.
Playing Matthee and Feinberg-Mngomezulu will also have helped Dobson, as those two players showed they deserve game time. Indeed, the Stormers have a different headache quite unlike the one the Sharks have right now. They have too many good players in the same position, and that could be a problem when it comes to satisfying those players’ ambitions.
Both players are good enough to warrant more exposure than they may get when Libbok and Willemse are available, yet while that may appear problematic it’s a much better problem to have than the one the Sharks have created for themselves through a decade of poor recruitment.