When the Springboks finished off their 2013 campaign with a victory over France in Paris, coach Heyneke Meyer spoke about the need for South African rugby to undergo revolutionary change in order to close the gap that the All Blacks enjoyed when it came to conditioning and mental strength.
At the start of the 2014 Castle Lager Rugby Championship, he continued the theme of revolution, this time talking about the need to bring greater intensity and tempo to the Bok game, to be able to out-think opponents now that the days of bludgeoning opposition with physicality are in the past.
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To achieve those objectives, Meyer recognised he needed buy-in from the provinces and Super Rugby franchises, and in that respect he would have been pleased to be present when DHL Western Province coach Allister Coetzee addressed the Cape media at the start of the build-up week to Saturday’s appealing top of the log Absa Currie Cup clash with the Xerox Golden Lions at Newlands.
The Stormers in the latter part of Super Rugby and WP in the early stages of the domestic season are talking a language and embracing a style of rugby that is a millions miles away from the kick and tackle approach that was their staple for the previous three or four years.
It is not that they’ve lost their minds, for kicking does have its place, and the WP brainstrust aren’t ignoring the statistics that reflect that teams that kick the most tend to win. It is rather how you kick and how you apply it that is receiving attention, and here the recruitment of Vlok Cilliers as specialist kicking coach was a huge step in the right direction.
Neither is the WP/Stormers philosophy geared just towards attack. Defence is still a big focus, and in the big win over the Blue Bulls last week the WP dominance was achieved while making a whopping 269 tackles (that was the figure Coetzee gave us) against the Bulls’ 87. When WP did strike, it was often off turn-over ball deep in their territory, and they used the width of the field in producing 40 metre and 60 metre attacks.
Marrying a strong defensive game with a potent attacking template requires not just a change in mindset, but also a change in conditioning, and when Coetzee spoke on Monday afternoon, it was not difficult to see similarities between what he was talking about and the approach of the Kiwi coach/conditioning duo of John Mitchell/Wayne Taylor when the Lions won the Currie Cup in 2011.
Mitchell used to talk about taking his players out of their comfort zones and beyond their aerobic threshold during the training week, and that is what Coetzee and the WP fitness coaches are doing now, with the Tuesday practice being marked down as a “red zone”, meaning high intensity session.
“I have spoken to Heyneke and what we are doing is in line with the way the Boks want to go. We wanted to start introducing this system earlier in the year but we were prevented from doing so because of all the injuries, but now we have decided to press on with it,” said Coetzee.
“You cannot play a wider game and one based on being able to switch quickly from defence to attack without being conditioned to do so. A player cannot make good decisions when he is tired, and repeat effort is important, meaning you get up from the floor and go straight back into the play. We recognised that long ago, but it is only now that we are able to start really getting down to getting that conditioning right.”
“To me what was telling against the Bulls was how we made so many tackles and then we turned over the ball and scored 40- and 60-metre tries. We surprised them with the tempo of our play. On our schedule, we have a red session on a Tuesday where we take them to a place where they’ve never been. The session is structured so that it is actually tougher than the 80 minutes that you play.”
Coetzee added that the change of training approach was what had prompted the adaptation to the WP weekly schedule that now sees them work on Monday and Tuesday before taking a day off on Wednesday. In the past the Stormers and WP worked from Monday through to Wednesday, with Thursday as their day off.
“After a red session the recovery is crucially important so Wednesday has to be our day off now, an opportunity for the players to recover,” said Coetzee.
The revolution in the WP training regime has impacted on Coetzee’s selection policy, for he says that players who are out injured for a short while cannot as easily be absorbed quickly back into the system.
“When a player is out now he misses the red sessions, and that leaves him considerably behind the other players in terms of sharpness. That was why I didn’t just return Ruan Botha to the starting team when he recovered from his injury last week. And it is why I will have to think twice before considering him or Rynhardt Elstadt, or Scarra Ntubeni too when he is over his injury, for a starting place.”
“Those players, and Kurt Coleman, might be just a little bit off the pace initially, and they need to be brought up to speed. You have to make sure that the players coming back are at the same level of sharpness as the other players in the team.”
Coetzee said that the intention is to build a base for the Stormers to be able to play at a higher intensity in next year’s Super Rugby, and inject the necessary balance to their game, which was why the Springboks were included in the pre-season training camp.
“I felt we needed to get everyone on the same page and make everyone aware of what we are doing,” said Coetzee.
The WP coach hinted that the players could look forward to a tough off-season as it will be in the pre-season phase that the conditioning groundwork will be laid for next year.
“I want to stress we are not out to neglect our defence, in fact the reason we can now take this route is because we have been given such a solid base defensively. The teams that have problems when they try to play high tempo attacking rugby are the ones that work on that aspect before they look at their defensive game. Our defensive base and our structure is in place.”