WP need to back Coleman to the hilt
Gavin Rich hopes that WP won’t be seeings Kurt Coleman’s appearance in the No 10 jersey as a one-off opportunity.
|||Cape Town - There was a lot of talk about Saturday’s Currie Cup game against Griquas being Kurt Coleman’s last chance to prove himself, but hopefully Western Province won’t be seeings appearance in the No 10 jersey as a one-off opportunity.
Bearing in mind the wide chasm in the standard of Super Rugby and the Currie Cup, it would make no sense to see a home match against Griquas as the litmus test of a player’s ability to play pivot in next year’s Super Rugby campaign.
This is being written before Saturday’s game and my crystal ball is playing up, so I can’t be sure how it turned out, but I would imagine that WP had enough front-foot ball and enough of a forward platform to make it a relatively comfortable afternoon for Coleman.
But even if that wasn’t the case and he struggled, the WP management need to either stick with him for the rest of the competition, or alternate him in the starting role with Robert du Preez. It makes no sense to play Demetri Catrakilis there when he is going to be playing in France when next season’s Super Rugby rolls around and the Stormers need a flyhalf.
When the decision was made to play Catrakilis, I imagined that WP director of rugby Gert Smal must have been confident of securing a top-quality flyhalf from outside the Cape. Or at least I hoped so, for otherwise it made absolutely no sense to have Coleman, or Du Preez, waiting behind a player whose future lies elsewhere.
The imminent World Cup has meant that I haven’t been focusing much on the Currie Cup. But if I was going to be here through until October and was briefed with covering Province rugby, deciding which of Coleman or Du Preez would be best equipped to wear the Stormers No 10 jersey would have been my main point of interest.
Even if Smal does succeed in landing a big fish to play the most crucial backline position in next year’s Super Rugby, we all know how injuries can play havoc with the best laid plans. It would be disingenuous for the Stormers to complain next March that their starting flyhalves lack experience if they haven’t been allowed to gain experience in the Currie Cup.
I do have sympathy for the WP line that the fans expect them to win the Currie Cup, and it can’t be sold to their supporters for what it is a development competition for Super Rugby.
But that sympathy only lasts for as long as it takes to get to the next point of logic, which is that their policy of selecting Catrakilis meant that Coleman was effectively being sent the message that he isn’t good enough to win a Currie Cup for the union. If that is the case, how are you going to justify punting him to win you a Super Rugby title next year?
I would understand if we were back in the 1980s, and it was Northern Transvaal under the microscope, which would mean it was a choice between Naas Botha and, for example, Opa van Zyl. If Catrakilis was a Naas, and Coleman wasn’t anywhere near his league, then it would be understandable.
But that isn’t the case, and lest it be forgotten, it was Coleman, and not Catrakilis, who was wearing the Stormers No 10 when they rallied well by winning a succession of games playing an enterprising style of rugby in the second half of the 2014 Super Rugby campaign. At that point, it was Catrakilis who was playing off the bench, so it’s not like the players are wide apart.
Coleman does have some ability, plenty of it in fact, and perhaps former coach Allister Coetzee was right - he just needs to spend time in the starting team in order to get his momentum and confidence up.
Coleman started this past Super Rugby season in fine form and he was succeeding with some important goalkicks. It was only once the season was heading towards the halfway point and he’d spent more time warming the bench than playing, that it started to go pear-shaped for him.
We were told this week that Coleman was always going to play the Griquas game. A policy of giving him an occasional easy game would make sense if we were talking Super Rugby, for instance if Saturday’s visitors were the struggling Reds.
But if you want Coleman to be ready for Super Rugby, he has to start in most or all of the Currie Cup games, not just in one or two of the easier ones. That teaches you nothing.
The approach that they adopt to the Currie Cup probably needs to be re-thought, not just by WP but by all the unions with a Super Rugby identity - with the possible exception of the Bulls.
I remember Jake White expressing surprise that his contract with the Sharks included Currie Cup performance clauses, and he shouldn’t have been surprised, given that his brief should surely have been to get that franchise to win the big competition - which is Super Rugby.
Weekend Argus