Bulls want to turn tables on Blues

It’s the Cheetahs against the Sharks in Bloemfontein tomorrow. in the Cheetahs half in of the field and the Sharks half of the field take a light-hearted look at the match.

THERE is something about playing in New Zealand that is often the undoing of many South African sides and the Bulls are no different.

As they prepare to play their first game in the land of the Long White Cloud against the Blues at the QBE Stadium in North Harbour, there will be a dark cloud hanging over Nollis Marais’ side of having only beaten the Blues once in 10 outings in Auckland.

The Bulls’ trip into unchartered waters and the ugly record they have in Auckland makes them the clear underdogs even though they come up against a Blues side that have won only one out of their four games.

But Marais seems to enjoy the underdog tag, not only in transferring the pressure to the home side but in probably finding a source of motivation for his team as they try to resuscitate a campaign that has hardly got out of the starting blocks.

“If I look at all the newspapers at the moment, all South African teams travelling to New Zealand are underdogs so it doesn’t matter who plays here. It is obviously going to be a difficult task but I think it is nice going into the game as underdogs (because) then our guys know what they have to play for. We know about the history but it will only be the scoreline that matters and the guys are really looking forward to the match,” said Marais from Auckland yesterday.

But the look of the Bulls won’t be of a team of underdogs as Marais has made some changes to the side that will help bring in the experience and take away the fear of playing in the enemy’s backyard.

Adriaan Strauss takes over the reins and will lead the side, taking over from Handre Pollard

BULLS

while last week’s hooker Edgar Marutlulle drops out of the match day 23 with Jaco Visagie starting from the bench.

The much stronger and steadier Lizo Gqoboka is the right choice loosehead while Nick de Jager comes in at No 7 in place of the suspended Renaldo Bothma.

The most significant change to the Bulls team comes in the midfield where Marais has partnered Springbok Jan Serfontein and Jesse Kriel while keeping intact the back three of fullback Warrick Gelant and wings Jamba Ulengo and Travis Ismaiel.

For Serfontein tomorrow will be a special moment as he makes his 50th Super Rugby appearance for the Bulls but it will be his red hot form that will be more meaningful for his team’s intentions.

“It is nice to be back in the mix and playing as well as I did last week. I’m just looking at building on that performance and looking forward to Saturday’s game,” said Serfontein after his two tries against the Sunwolves at Loftus Versfeld.

While it makes sense that the Bulls immerse themselves in fixing their problems, turning their back on history and giving Serfontein a milestone to remember for all the right reasons, it will also be worth their while to ponder what not to do against a Blues side that has shown the ability to be dangerous when handed possession and space but are struggling to closing out matches. IS THERE a resemblance between Franco Smith, pictured left, and Forrest Gump? If the Cheetahs coach grew his hair a bit then maybe, even if it’s a long-shot, but what is undisputed is that in the case of both men, life is like a box of chocolates … you never know what you’re going to get. Smith has mixed and matched his Cheetahs team from one round to the next this season, mainly because so many of his players have been struck down by injury, but he left his biggest surprise for last weekend.

For those of you who stayed up for the 9.40pm Saturday kick-off you’d have noticed something in the match against the Jaguares you’d have last seen some 17 years ago, not too far away from the Velez Sarsfield Stadium, at the bigger and much more famous River Plate.

On that day, November 12, 2000 in Buenos Aires, one Harry Viljoen, then the Springboks’ new Mike Greenaway

THERE was a time when an in-house joke among the Sharks team was that a visit to Bloemfontein would mean a home game for most of the players.

The joke was that the Sharks saved on hotel bills in Bloem because the players stayed at home.

The Sharks have indeed been the chief plunderers of prime Free State beef over the year, going way back to the days of Vleis Visagie, Piet Strydom and De Wet Ras, and the conveyor belt really got going in the when the likes of Andre Joubert, Henry Honiball, Pieter Muller helped build the Sharks team of the ’90s.

The Cheetahs players just kept coming to Durban, from AJ Venter, to Stephen Brink, Andries Strauss, Ruan Pienaar, Francois Steyn, Jannie and Bismarck du Plessis and so on.

Lately, the Sharks include Bloem men in Michael Claassens, Cobus Reinach and Coenie Oosthuizen.

It has been largely one-way traffic between Bloemfontein and Durban, but there will be at coach, in his first match in charge, ordered his team, captained by Andre Vos, to not kick the ball. Ever.

It was a match, and performance, that will live long in the memory; the Boks snatching a 37-33 win. Viljoen though, obsessed with ball-in-hand rugby, never tried the trick again.

Last Saturday though, Smith did.

His Cheetahs team, already on the back foot, were told to not kick the ball in the second half because almost every time they’d done so in the first 40 minutes and least one Durban product in the Cheetahs’ 23 tomorrrow in flyhalf Fred Zeilinga.

To a degree a Sharks-Cheetahs matches in the Free State capital have always been “old boys reunions” for products of Grey Bloem.

But there will be no love lost between the sides tomorrow given the frame of mind of both teams, especially the Sharks.

I would not have been surprised if I had seen painters heading into the change-rooms at the Shark Tank on Monday to sort out the paint peeled off the wall following the roasting the players received from furious coach Robert du Preez, pictured, after his team had done their best to lose to the hapless Kings. missed touch, they conceded a try. In the second half they kicked to touch once; centre Clinton Swart, if memory serves, the “guilty party”.

In the end the Cheetahs took a pasting, but one’s got to wonder what Smith will come up with this weekend.

If he was channelling Viljoen last weekend, perhaps it’ll be Rassie Erasmus this time around, he being another former somewhat eccentric Cheetahs boss.

Remember the disco lights on top of the stadium roof?