Durban – The curtain has come down on the South African Super Rugby challenge, and were a school teacher writing a report it would pretty much be “worked well in some areas but could have done better”.
In other words it was an average performance overall, and the absence of a South African team from Saturday’s final is fair enough – none of our teams played well enough over the course of the season to deserve a place in the final.
We were simply average. We have had much worse seasons, and too often it was the Lions and the Cheetahs (or the Cats) occupying the bottom two positions, but this year South African teams were simply too inconsistent, apart from the Bulls, and for every impressive victory there was a shock defeat.
The Bulls indeed stuck manfully to the task and ground out wins, but towards the end of the competition they were found out to be, well, average.
When the Sharks were at full strength and travelled to Loftus for the penultimate round robin game they outplayed the Bulls, and only poor goal kicking from the visitors saved the home side.
The following week the Stormers gave the Bulls a hiding, and then in the semi-final the Brumbies did the unthinkable and won in Pretoria, again proving that the highest-finishing South African team was, in fact, average.
The impressive form of the Stormers and the Sharks towards the end of the season underlined why they were tipped to be our best teams for 2013, but quite obviously they produced too little too late.
They finished seventh and eighth, mid-table, and having lost as many games as they had won, their seasons can only be described as average.
The same cannot be said for the Cheetahs, who finished a position above the Stormers in sixth place and qualified for their first ever Super Rugby play-off.
They came within a goal kick of beating the Brumbies in Canberra for a place in the semi-finals, and even though they lost their season was a great success. We should not forget that in the pre-season, they were touted as being one of the teams that should make way for the Kings, and look how they responded! Good on the Cheetahs, they did South Africa proud. And the same should be said for the Kings.
Yes, they indeed finished last, as everybody predicted, but nobody envisaged that they would win so many friends in the process. They won three games and pulled off a memorable draw in Canberra against the Brumbies, and generally gave a good account of themselves.
They started from scratch and were immediately competitive, and every team had to sweat to beat them. The Kings can hold their heads high.
Can the Bulls, Stormers and Sharks hold their heads equally high? Not really.
The Bulls plodded along and deserved to win the South African conference, but when the going got tough they were exposed.
The Sharks and the Stormers will point out high injury counts as mitigating factors, and there is merit in that, but at the end of the day they were just too inconsistent, and the teacher’s comment was always going to be: “Average. Should have done better.”
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