CHEETAHS v SHARKS
Jacques van der Westhuyzen in the Cheetahs half of the field and Mike Greenaway in the Sharks half of the field take a light-hearted look at the match
Tomorrow, 5.15pm on SS1
Always willing to experiment
IS THERE a resemblance between Franco Smith and Forrest Gump? If the Cheetahs coach grew his hair a bit then maybe ... even then it’s a longshot, 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 so far 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 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 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?
What is it with these Cheetahs coaches? The Sharks had better prepare for anything.
No Grey areas for the Sharks
There was a time when an in-house joke amongst 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 because the players stayed at home. The Sharks have indeed been the chief plunderers of prime Free State beef over the years, going way back to the days of Vleis Visagie, Piet Strydom and De Wet Ras, and the conveyor belt really got going in the ‘90s 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 least one Durban product in the Cheetahs’ 22 in flyhalf Fred Zeilinga.
So to a degree a SharksCheetahs 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 after his team had done their best to lose to the Kings.
The Sharks have been seriously chastised by the ruthless Du Preez. They will play out of their skins against the Cheetahs.
WILL RUN AT EVERYTHING: Sergeal Petersen. HOMETOWN BOY: Coenie Oosthuizen.