RUGBY Leinster’s Jacques of all trades
LATE SCARE IN SEMI DOESN’T WORRY WORLD CHAMPION
JACQUES Nienaber is a rugby philosopher at the best of times — his players consider him quite the rugby scientist too.
But sitting on the sideline last Saturday watching Leinster’s fallaway fourth quarter and analysing Toulouse on Sunday and spotting their fall-away third quarter, can’t be simple.
How could two teams produce two brilliant, unplayable first halves, the perfect ten-outta-ten if you like — and then, so pronouncedly fall off a cliff-edge for a 20 minute period in the secondhalf.
Is there anything to help us Jacques, any philosophy or science treatises — in Sun Tsu’s Art of War, Sarte or Socrates or science from Einstein, Oppenheimer or the newly confirmed Herr Doktor Rassie Erasmus?
Quarter
How could something so right go so wrong (Jermaine Jackson if you must know) for both teams — the third quarter for Toulouse (0-14), the fourth quarter for Leinster (017)!
“I just think rugby is like life,
(centre) some days you feel down, some days you feel great,”shrugs Nienaber.
“You are not feeling brilliant every day for 50 years, that’s life. There is ebbs and flows in the game and momentum is going with you and momentum is going against you.
“It’s just how you absorb that. That’s the beauty of knockout rugby. There will be back and forth in the game and there will be opportunities. Don’t take them and the other team can punish you. It’s as simple as that.
Belief
“Take the Toulouse game. Momentum was with them but then their execution was bad and then it gets to the other team and they get belief and then you have to get a foothold again.”
Then again, as Toulouse’s Ugo Mola pointed out late on Sunday, Nienaber is the king of knock-out rugby — just look at his record with the Springboks.
RWC1999 had a three-point South
Africa semi-final win; RWC2023 had single point ‘Bok wins in the quarter-final, semi-final and final!
“You do what you have to do, there is no bonus points in these types of matches you just want to win.
“I always think when you play in a semi-final like last Saturday and your opposition is of the calibre of Northampton, they are always going to come back.
“Remember the losing side can get to a stage where they see things that would have been risky at the start of the game isn’t quite the risk anymore because you are now at such a stage you are willing to risk more and more and more.
Risk
“Sometimes that risk doesn’t pay off and the game just runs away.”
The incentive is there for the losing side to gamble.
“You are sometimes between a rock and a hard place, if you don’t take those risks now you are not going to get back into the game and if those things stick then you get yourself back into the game.
“It is handling the reality of that, knowing that teams will take a little bit more risk.
“A team that’s leading they must make sure they don’t get
MAKING HIS MARK: Former South Africa boss Jacques Nienaber has settled in well at Leinster into a containment mode in their mind that they still keep on ‘attacking’ — I’m not talking attacking rugby, but attacking the game.
“Sometimes in attacking rugby your mindset is right but the execution is poor, you give a penalty away, you are too eager or you’re not technically good enough — so, your mindset is good but your execution is poor.
Handle
“Leinster didn’t fall into containment mode in that secondhalf. We had opportunities to attack with ball in hand, there was that 19-phases and then we coughed the ball up which was poor execution — we just didn’t handle well enough in attack, coughed up possession too much.”
Similarly, insists Nienaber, his team ‘attacked’, the Doris/Baird turnover at the end being the perfect example.
“Remember you can attack the game in various ways even if you don’t have the ball, so in my mind we did attack the game when Caelan and Jack went for the poach.
“That was full-on attack because that was the window of opportunity that was there, a defensive opportunity that was there — in my opinion it was a good decision, spot on.”
It won the game too.