Finally, the players who do the Currie Cup hard yards will get to finish the job

THE Currie Cup is indeed a rich tapestry of history dating back more than 120 years. It has never ceased to captivate the attention of South Africans, no matter what has been happening on other rugby stages before and during the months it is under way, such as Rugby World Cups or Tri-Nations competitions.

This year will be no different, despite the South African Rugby Union decree that this year, for the first time, the contracted Springboks will play no part in the Currie Cup.

This is primarily to protect our leading players from burnout before next year’s Rugby World Cup, and in that light it should be commended. But it should also be seen as the opportunity at last for the players who do the hard yards during the competition to have the chance to see the campaign through.

I think it is a good move all round, and it is going to be a good test of our emerging coaches, no more so than Sharks coach Brad MacleodHenderson, who will have a squad of relative greenhorns to start the campaign.

And there will be no returning Springboks to rescue the situation later in the year, not that the Sharks have ever had this problem.

They have had the opposite complication in recent years. A squad of players has built solidly through the weeks of tough Currie Cup competition, and then there has been the “problem” of Springboks returning from the Rugby Championship.

Some of them, quite frankly, have been disinterested, but they have been “big name” players and drawcards, and their provincial employers have wanted their Boks to earn the handsome crust of bread they get at the end of every month.

A classic example was in 2011, when the Sharks won their way through to the final against a Lions team that had been relatively unaffected by Rugby World Cup call-ups that year. Coach John Mitchell played the same team from start to finish.

His opposite number for the final, John Plumtree, had the opposite problem. He had got to the play-offs without any of the Sharks’ 11 Springboks, and had done a remarkable job in fashioning a potentially Cup-winning team from a brand new squad at the start of the competition.

We need no reminding that the Springboks came home early from that World Cup, at the quarter-final stage in fact, and many of them were thrust into the Sharks team for that final at Ellis Park.

It was won convincingly by a “no-name brand” Lions team that, on paper, should have had no chance given the number of Boks in the Sharks team.

Afterwards, there were private reservations that the hearts of the Bok players in the Sharks team were just not in it, and who could blame them after they had travelled back from New Zealand cloaked in such bitter disappointment after losing to the Wallabies in a highly controversial match?

There have been other occasions when “returning Boks” have been blamed for semi-final defeats because they just did not have the hunger.

Again, can they really be blamed for something that is human nature? One week you are playing the All Blacks in an almighty match, and the next you are relegated into the Currie Cup, and you just can’t quite climb to the same rungs of the motivational ladder.

Plumtree used to interview each of his returning Boks on an individual basis and tried to gauge hunger, because naturally a player is going to tell the coach he will give it his best shot.

But is he really in the mental place to deliver for his province having just stepped down from the international stage?

I don’t think it is a bad thing that the players that do the hard work get to finish the job. We will see new heroes emerge during the competition, and they will deserve to feature in the play-off games.