Pumped and ready to rumble. How the South African Super rugby coaches feel before the start of the season.
JOHN PLUMTREE (Sharks)
You are always going to get a couple of surprises during pre-season. Some things were reinforced about certain individuals and we were pleasantly surprised about a couple of others.
The tough competition we’ve had has galvanised us early.
It will be intense and you’re going to have at least three extra games. If you qualify, it becomes a fairly long road and you’ll need to manage your squad well. Coaches will be more demanding in trying to get players as fresh as possible. From a management point of view, it is going to be more of a challenge.
Whether it was John (Smit) with a hamstring, or Bismarck (Du Plessis), or JP (Pietersen), we’ve had niggling injuries. We’ve had two or three forwards consistently injured through the pre-season, which has been a little frustrating.
Hopefully, by next week we’ll have everybody on board and available.
FRANS LUDEKE (Bulls)
I think we’ve ticked all the boxes in our pre-season. The last six weeks we’ve gone flat out. We’ve made some big changes to our preparation. Our focus has been on aerobic fitness because we believe the ball will be in general play longer and obviously the competition will be longer as well. The guys are in better shape than a year ago.
The competition is long and you can’t get ahead of yourself. The management of players will be vital because you’ll have to know when to go hard and when to ease up. Finding the right balance will be vital for us.
We’ve got two byes and mentally we’ll try to break up the tournament like that.
The guys who were injured – Gary (Botha), Wynand (Olivier), Victor (Matfield) and Fourie (Du Preez) – are all back. In fact, we may be close to picking our full-strength squad next week.
ALLISTER COETZEE (Stormers)
“I’m very satisfied with our preparation. Our conditioning was really good. The young players did really well in the first two warm-up matches but when we got to the Neo Africa Series we could focus more on the technical and tactical aspects our play.
We paid particular attention to the breakdown. I think it is going to be a deciding factor. We could also assess our defence properly against teams such as the Lions and the Sharks.
We remain a work in progress, however.
Our conditioning is important because the ball will be kept in hand longer. That means even when you have the ball you have to do a lot of off-the-ball running.
We will be close to full strength in our opener. Gio Aplon has started playing, Francois Louw will play next week, Schalk Burger will be ready and only Jaque Fourie may miss the start.
JOHN MITCHELL (Lions)
We’ve got a better (fitness) platform this year. Hard work has gone in but you always worry that players get knocked off by injury.
We’ll focus on the things important to us, rather than on historical external pressures. It’s about consistency and sustaining performance over a longer competition.
The draw doesn’t matter because whatever you get you have to deal with. We are home and away in South Africa for 11 weeks before hitting the road. Then we are back here and hopefully can get ourselves into a position for the finals.
I suppose we are lucky to have a couple of matches at home at the start so we can get settled.
Our medical team were able to get a lot of our injury hot spots to the starting line. The main 22 I had in mind to start the competition are basically intact.
NAKA DROTSKE (Cheetahs)
I think our preparation has been the best in four years. We started two weeks after last year’s Currie Cup finished. We haven’t done more work because you have to be careful not to overload the players.
I think the trick is to manage the guys properly. You have to be able make full use of your squad system and rotate players accordingly.
Thankfully, we have better depth in our squad this year. We have more players competing for individual positions in the team.
Although the competition will ultimately place greater demands on the players, I don’t expect teams to approach the games tactically different from last year. The game hasn’t moved on that much.
We have Jongi (Nokwe), who is going miss the entire competition because of injury and we have Heinrich Brussow, who should be back by the third week of the tournament.