RUGBY NEWS - Western Province produced 80 minutes of ferocious play-off passion and intensity to secure a 19-5 win over the Golden Lions at Newlands on Saturday that books them a Currie Cup final against the Sharks in Durban next Saturday.
Even by the admission of their coach, John Dobson, WP underperformed during the league phase of the competition. Although they finished second on the log to enjoy the decisive home ground advantage in this semifinal, they made heavy weather of it and lost five games along the way. For most of the regular season they were some distance behind the Sharks both on the log and in performance, and Dobson wondered this past week at his team’s inability to find consistency and their disturbing habit of drifting in and out of games.
Perhaps though the last two Saturdays have answered Dobson’s questions. Last week’s game at Kings Park was effectively a knock-out fixture in the sense that the Cape side were chasing home-ground advantage in a semifinal. As a consequence they had the desperation and determination that saw them switch on for a full 80 minutes.
It was the same in front of a crowd of nearly 25 000 mostly passionate WP supporters in this game. Province knew it was do or die, they knew the result would define their season, or close to it, and as a result they played as if their very lives depended on it. Province always looked the bigger threat on attack, and might have felt they could have put the Lions away long before they did, but it was their determined defence that was the stand-out for the hosts.
Their impressive line-speed cut down the time the Lions had to put their dangerous attacking game into effect, and the two big Lions centres, Rohan Janse van Rensburg and Harold Vorster, were hardly a factor due to them being hit hard and frequently behind the advantage line. In a nutshell, the Lions, who were also second best at the set-scrums, were suffocated out of the game. Wilco Louw must have come extremely close to grabbing the man of the match award that eventually went to Nizaam Carr.
The visitors probably weren’t helped by their coach Swys de Bruin’s strange decision to depart from his published plan of starting with Springbok front-row players Malcolm Marx and Ruan Dreyer. By the time the pair were introduced the WP forward juggernaut had gained confidence, and Marx was never allowed to have the effect on the game that the Cape side might have feared.
WP were also ferocious at the breakdowns, and although Marx did secure a turn-over or two, it was Chris van Zyl’s men who made the bigger impression at the collisions and loose scrums. That was even though they lost their ace opensider Jaco Coetzee relatively early in the game. The Lions also lost a Coetzee at around the same time, Bok fullback Andries, and perhaps that hurt the visitors more than the loss of the flank hurt WP, who seemed to just raise their game once he departed.
