Bulls likely to break Saru agreement in bid to field best team

prior to going on tour, there will be pressure for Ludeke to afford the same resting period to the likes of Trevor Nyakane and Adriaan Strauss.

Strauss has played in all but one of the Bulls matches so far this season and is now due for his mandatory rest while Nyakane is yet to be rested.

Nyakane has been the standout player in the Bulls frontrow this season and will be a key component of Springbok coach Heyneke Meyer’s Rugby World Cup plans, having shown versatility in covering both loosehead and tighthead prop with aplomb this season.

Even though Nyakane’s primary and preferred position is at loosehead prop, the Bulls have been forced through the injuries to Werner Kruger and Marcel van der Merwe during the season to move Nyakane to tighthead where he has stood head and shoulders above most tighthead props in the country.

Ludeke, though, might be forced to renege on the agreement with Saru for a week or two as the Bulls press hard to break their eight match losing streak abroad and look for that elusive win when they play against the Chiefs on Friday and the Brumbies next week.

What will be important for Ludeke is to select his strongest team and that will be a frontrow that includes Nyakane, Strauss and Van der Merwe.

Further compounding Ludeke’s dilemma especially about Nyakane is that Bulls coach needs to have Nyakane in his team so as not to field a near lily-white team which would go against the gentlemen’s agreement with Saru for the franchises to have a fair sprinkling of players of colour in their starting line-ups and match day squads.

So far this season Ludeke has struggled to field more than three players of colour in his starting line-up and if Nyakane is to be rested then it will leave him with only scrumhalf Rudy Paige and wing Bjorn Basson as his players of colour.

Ludeke’s persistence with his incumbent frontrow will also be informed by the ineffectiveness that replacements Werner Kruger, Callie Visagie and Dean Greyling had in the Bulls 23-18 loss at the hands of the Blues last Friday in Auckland.

Ludeke acknowledged that his replacements struggled to make a difference in the scrum even though they managed to stand their ground.

“We stood our ground in the scrums but in the second half we couldn’t relieve the pressure applied by the Blues. I think we were fine in the scrums with the changes even though we didn’t dominate,” said Ludeke.

While Ludeke would have tossed and turned about the make up of his team in the lead