Cape Town - Having gone past the halfway mark in the United Rugby Championship, the Bulls will evaluate exactly where they stand in the competition at a coaches’ meeting today – and it won’t make for happy reading.
It will be a slightly more jovial mood at Loftus Versfeld following Friday night’s 45-7 bonus-point victory over Zebre in Parma, where the visitors scored six tries and dominated the last 50 minutes of the game.
But if director of rugby Jake White and the rest of the management group put any kind of sentiment aside, they will find that their team have fallen short of where they would have hoped to be at this stage of the tournament.
They are in 10th position on the log with 23 points, having won four and lost six, and have eight league matches to go before the play-offs.
Their points differential is minus seven, having garnered 213 points and given away 220, while they have scored and conceded 22 tries.
Compared to the top four teams – Leinster, Ulster, Glasgow and Munster – who have try ratios of 45/15, 30/17, 35/20 and 33/14 respectively, it puts the Bulls’ record in perspective.
White, though, has understandably pointed out several times this season that this is his team’s first season in European rugby, and that it will take time to adjust to the different teams and conditions.
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But just on the results alone, there were three victories that they should have secured. They were competitive for large parts of their 17-10 defeat to Edinburgh last October, and just seemed unable to land the knockout punch.
Then the defeat that probably hurts the most is the 30-26 reverse against the Stormers at Loftus Versfeld in January, where they were leading 26-18 going into the final 15 minutes, but allowed the Capetonians to score two late tries.
They were also far off their best in the 29-22 loss to the Sharks, again in Pretoria, a week later.
And while scoring six tries and 45 unanswered points will always please a coach, the Bulls should be careful not to get carried away with the Zebre win, considering the fact that the Italian club have lost all eight matches and were missing eight players to the Six Nations.
“You’ve got to build a team, but you’ve also got to keep developing our game. I spoke to the coaches, and on Monday, we’re going to have a bit of a refresher meeting – it was (a scheduled meeting), win or lose. It was never a crisis for us to meet on Monday,” White said.
“But on Monday, we need to see what has the last month chucked at us, how is the game going, what are the stats like in other teams? Where are teams conceding tries and scoring tries?
“But I’m also fully aware of the fact that we are trying to build a squad. It’s a work in progress.
“I’m still glad that we are alive and can still control things, and we’ve got to keep playing that way because I genuinely do believe that the way that the game goes – having coached in Japan, Australia and France – we can’t get conservative and think you are going to win competitions that stretch over long periods of time.”
@AshfakMohamed