With the Vodacom United Rugby Championship looming just weeks away, coaches face a dilemma as they prepare their teams for the Currie Cup semifinals. Balancing the need to compete fiercely in the play-offs with the risk of injury ahead of the URC season presents a complex challenge.
Oh to be a fly on the wall when the coaches deliver their pre-match oratory ahead of Saturday’s Carling Currie Cup semifinals. The timing of the deciding phase of the domestic season has conspired to deliver some very mixed messages that could make the pre-match talks more interesting than they’d usually be.
It’s a proper Currie Cup semifinal, meaning a proper game, so there will only be 23 players allowed. So around half the team will have to go through the full 80 minutes. Which was the right thing for him to do, as he was talking on the Currie Cup platform. But while he said some past Sharks players had been down to Kings Park to speak to the players about the Currie Cup and its history, and past Sharks and Natal achievements, he was honest enough to admit that the trip to Loftus was mainly pre-season preparation for the URC.
When Plumtree said “We are not looking beyond this week” was he also hinting that if his team does make the final, which falls just seven days before he has to be in Connacht with his URC team for a difficult start to that competition, he will return the young players that got the Sharks to their third spot on the log to the team?
The Lions finished top of the log and played the Currie Cup season with more URC players than the other sides. That may catch up with them later on in the season when URC and Challenge Cup commitments mount up, but the signals from the Johannesburg union is that they want to replicate what happened in the middle of last decade.
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