Battle for Blues to
If there season was hanging by a thread before they played the Sharks, the Blues are now clinging to almost nothing. Once again, they find themselves already facing a near impossible situation to do anything other than make up the numbers.
They have lost four of their five games but the micro analysis is of a team hitting a steep downward trend. They were poor in their previous outing against the Stormers and just as bad again against the Sharks.
Coach Tana Umaga liked the fact his side played with more heart and urgency in Auckland than in Cape Town but couldn’t find any solace in the lack of accuracy, poor game management and ill-discipline. He branded the result embarrassing but remained hopeful his side can find the fortitude to bounce back.
“I think we got the effort,” said Umaga. “The execution of our game plan wasn’t the best, our wayward kicking. We don’t help ourselves in that respect. Our game understanding and game awareness is still a big work-on for us. Leaking 60 points is not good enough. It is not a structural thing, it is individual. It was an embarrassing one for us.”
There will need to be ample soul searching through the week and some tough questions asked about individual performances.
Conceding 60 points at home is a travesty and suggests there is a lot more wrong with the club than may have been apparent in recent weeks.
This was bad, a real stinker of a performance that had poor basic skills, a lack of discipline and maybe even a lack of heart.
Their season is in pieces but the question now is are they in freefall, or do they have the fight to find their way back to respectability?
On the basis of what they have produced the past two weeks, it’s hard, despite Umaga’s confidence, to believe it will be anything but the former. It seems unlikely they can fix all their problems in the next few weeks because the list is extensive.
The visitors earned their points all right. They defended with structure and passion, offloaded superbly at times, ran neat lines, kicked well and slowed the Blues’ possession at the breakdown.
But there’s no denying they were able to look better than they are, as the Blues were awful — those eight minutes aside when the Sharks were reduced to 14 men and the hosts scored 21 points.
Something clicked within the Blues at that point. They suddenly pulled off these sweeping moves where they passed and ran into space. The forwards ran harder, bashed over the gainline and cleaned out better, the tries came, and from being 26-7 down at halftime, the Blues were 28-26 up with 25 minutes to play.
But as quickly as it began, it ended. The Sharks, once they had 15 men