Short answer, yes. It will remain the business until forever.
The Lions won the SA Shield by continually shifting the point of contact, interplay between backs and forwards and allowing the backs enough ball to make something happen.
A few weeks ago, Francke Horn made a break and offloaded to Venter who ended up scoring. This was a try that started in the Lions 22.
Two forwards were responsible for scoring the try. That's the superficial take.
But when you read between the lines you realise that it's because the Lions shift their attack constantly that gaps open up and forwards can break out. Had the Lions played the simple one-off runner bash and smash, tries like that wouldn't happen because there would be no gap.
Thinking beck to the dominant ABs, how many images do we have burned into our minds of Whitelock and Jaws finding themselves in space and either scoring or making the offload for the score? An abundant amount, is the answer. Why? Because again, they shifted the point of context continually and it opened up gaps.
And then we look at the Champions cup. Both this and last weekend, the European teams continually shift between hitting up with the forwards and then sending it wide. And, surprisingly, the steal count remains reasonably low. Some of Toulon's tries last weekend made the Stompies look like fools.
Glasgow warriors lost yesterday against Toulon but the amount of times the ball went down the backline was very high, from both teams. And both those teams beat our teams last weekend. Our teams that are packed with Springboks.
Today we'll see Bordeaux v Toulouse and it will be more of the same. Slick handling, combining jabs and big shots and ultimately playing balanced rugby. And yes, both those sides are better than any of our franchises too.
The Boks have success, yes. But how healthy is the rest of our rugby? Reading the match threads, there seems to be a consensus that our franchise coaching is below par. The Sharks suck, the Stormers look confused, the Bulls are slowly improving and the team filled with nobodies is playing the best rugby of them all.
That last sentence tells you there's a problem. The team with the least big names is paying the best rugby. That means that all things being equal, the big franchises are not playing to their potential and that is squarely down to coaches.
Perhaps the next thing I'm gonna say is controversial, but I think we have taken the last decade's influx of black and coloured players and thought that their natural talent would automatically plug the backline play gap.
And then when that doesn't work, which it obviously won't, we lose faith in backing our backs and revert to stampkar.
Meanwhile you look at European sides and it's clear how well drilled their backs are, how well they combine and how simple it is to make them effective once you make a habit of trusting them and shifting the point of contact.
It feels like the Saffa teams don't really need a massive shift in order to compete. But there needs to be an understanding that individual brilliance plays second fiddle to cohesions and that we have to start trusting our backs a lot more. Literally all of our franchises could compete and maybe even dominate in terms of backline play because we have all the players we need. It just feels to me like the message needs to change.
Anyway, just some Sunday coffee ramblings.