Whilst the blowhard kbbs think they have the comp all wrapped up they need to keep all their chest beating haka type behaviour to a minimum.
Ex Supersport!
The Crusaders will go into the play-off phase of Vodacom Super Rugby as clear favourites to retain their title but don’t write off an Emirates Lions team that has key players back and is running into form at just the right time.
They say a week can be a long time in rugby, but so can a weekend. Before the last round of league matches, it looked like the Lions were a long way from repeating their feat of the past two seasons of making the final. At that point, even their position at the top of the South African conference was not secure, and the Waratahs loss to the Brumbies that enabled the Lions to take second spot on the overall log seemed unlikely.
But that result went the Lions’ way and although they started slowly against the Vodacom Bulls, once their forwards got into the game there was only going to be one winner in their game in Johannesburg. They served notice on the other teams even in defeat at Kings Park a fortnight earlier, but this past weekend they wrote it out in indelible ink writ large above their home fortress at Emirates Airlines Park - their pack is a much more formidable unit when Malcolm Marx and Warren Whiteley are in the mix.
The hunger and the energy is back, and more than that, the Lions have a relatively uncomplicated passage to the final if they keep things uncomplicated and let their big men do the talking and lay the platform for them.
If anything, their quarterfinal against the Jaguares this coming weekend could be the more difficult of the two potential home play-off games they will play to get to the decider. The Jaguares were wise to rest their top players against the Cell C Sharks and will be pleased that they just have to undertake the one hour flight from Durban for the match rather than travel to Sydney, which would have been the case had the Waratahs finished second.(Sharkbokkie and other vocla and deluded Shark supporters should just admit the Jags had no intention of winning the game)
Should they get through the game against the South American team, however, the Lions should feel they are in the good part of the draw. For their likely semifinal opponents will be the Waratahs or Highlanders. The Lions whitewashed the Waratahs in Sydney at the start of their Australasian tour in April, while the Highlanders didn’t really travel well when they came to South Africa at around the same time.
The Dunedin team did hang in to win a close game against the Bulls at Loftus, one where they were perhaps aided by some dubious refereeing decisions, but they were comprehensively outplayed by the Sharks in Durban. The smart money should be on the Lions beating either opponent, and then it will be the final.
Okay, so they would probably have to travel, and their record in New Zealand this year was pretty woeful - in fact their record against Kiwi sides full stop was poor - but there is just an outside chance that the final could be in Johannesburg. That would come about if the Hurricanes or Chiefs knock over the Crusaders in the other semifinal, or of course in the unlikely event that the Sharks win in Christchurch this coming weekend. (Pull finger sharkies you whipped the old crusts with 13 men so why not!!!)
But while the Lions’ forward play is good enough to take them all the way if they have a bit of luck and the ball bounces for them, there are aspects of their game that require work. One of them is their defence, which was way too passive against the Bulls, and has tended to be a bit loose throughout the season.
The Lions contend that their aim is just to make sure they score more tries than the opposition do, but that could come back to bite them if the pack doesn’t dominate the Jaguares in the same way as it dominated the Bulls and before that the Sharks. The Jaguares’ first choice team certainly has the artillery to exploit and capitalise on any Lions vulnerabilities.
Mention of their previous game against the Sharks also brings up another point - are the Lions going to persist with their policy of kicking every penalty to touch now that the play-offs have arrived? The Bulls weren’t good enough to make them pay, but the decision to persist with the line-out drive when they were 19-12 ahead could have had the same repercussions as similar decisions had on their match in Durban.
The Lions say they want to score tries, but wouldn’t it be easier to achieve that objective by creating the scoreboard pressure that forces the opposition to play catch-up? The Lions might have found the task of subduing the Bulls a lot easier had they turned their seven point advantage into a 22-12 lead early in the second half.
Going more than a score behind always has a negative psychological impact on opponents, and as the Sharks showed in the one game that the Lions have lost to a South African team in the past three years, an opponent that is being dominated can be emboldened by the minutes where the dominant team aren’t able to convert that superiority into points.
That is particularly so in this era where stoppages make every game a stop-start affair and prevent the fatigue element from becoming the big factor that it could. The commentators raved a bit about ball in play time at Emirates Airlines Park, but what wasn’t mentioned that every three to four minutes of furious rugby was then followed by several minutes standing around while the referees and TMOs consulted, or while scrums were set and re-set.
No-one seems to be listening but it is killing the game worldwide, and of course, given that it was a wet weather game, it was even worse in Durban, where the Jaguares decision to rest their top players even further sapped the atmosphere of what was effectively a competition eliminator.
The Jaguares’ selection meant there was never too much doubt the Sharks would win, but Robert du Preez’s team should be concerned about how much possession the understrength Jaguares had to play with. The Sharks’ defence was good against a team made up of scratch combinations on a wet field, but the Crusaders will ask questions that the Jaguares didn’t.
Of course the Crusaders ask questions of everyone and they end the league phase as the stand-out team. It will take something special to stop them. Don't bet on it happening, but if a team other than the Crusaders is going to win the competition, the Lions are as good a bet as any, for the Hurricanes or Chiefs would have to travel to South Africa for a final.
