SYMPATHY MAY BE IN SHORT SUPPLY
It is never nice when someone gets sacked and usually there is some sympathy for the person relieved of his post, particularly from those who work in the industry, but I am not sure how many current or former Kiwi coaches will have sympathy for Scott ‘Razor’ Robertson.
The break-dancing former coach of Crusaders was sacked overnight - well it was overnight in South Africa - after a player review that was pretty damning and forced the Chairman of NZ Rugby, David Kirk, to act. Halfway through the current World Cup cycle Robertson has been shown the door.
Why he might not get sympathy, particularly from some of his immediate predecessors Ian Foster and Steve Hansen, is that Robertson made himself unpopular within the inner circle for the way he campaigned for the job, particularly midway through the last World Cup cycle when Foster was under siege following his team’s rare home series defeat defeat to Ireland and the loss to the Springboks in Nelspruit.
Robertson was known to be critical of All Black coaches over a period of time and there were many who were looking forward to seeing how he’d handle the criticism and the pressures of the job once he was in the hot-seat. There was a feeling among some people of my ken who are linked to New Zealand rugby that Robertson was a charismatic coach rather than a technically strong one and might not be quite the same easy fit for the All Blacks that he was for the Crusaders team he built his coaching reputation on.
That isn’t a unique concern, and I am not sure Stormers coach John Dobson would be upset with me if I suggested he is more of a fit for the Cape team than he might be for any other team, including the Boks. In fact he said something to that effect as recently as last week. The passion he has for the team that represents the region he has lived in most of his life (he was actually born in Welkom!) would be hard to replicate elsewhere.
Likewise Rassie Erasmus coaching another nation where it would be harder for him to pursue the strong nationalistic line in his motivational speeches that he does with the Boks.
IF JOSEPH COMES IN IT COULD IMPACT ‘TONYBALL’
It didn’t take long for the news of Robertson’s axing to sink in before my mind went wandering down a certain path: What will this mean for the Boks? That is not just an acknowledgement that the All Blacks might be a better and more formidable team under a different coach, but what it might mean if the New Zealand job is now given to the man who appears to be the early favourite - Jamie Joseph.
Scott Robertson has departed as Head Coach of the All Blacks. We wish Razor all the best with his next steps.
— All Blacks (@AllBlacks) January 15, 2026
A process will commence immediately to recruit a new Head Coach. pic.twitter.com/WWDtsox5ed
Joseph, a 20 capped All Black, coached Japan to the quarterfinal of their own World Cup in 2019, and he has also achieved success with the Highlanders. And for almost all of his coaching career at the highest levels, he’s had a certain right hand man named Tony Brown alongside him.
“They’ve always done everything together in the past so I’d be surprised if Jamie doesn’t approach Tony,” was the response I got to a message sent to someone who knows both.
Of course Brown is under contract to the Boks and he’s a decent guy who you’d imagine would want to honour any commitment he has made to South Africa. The impact he has had on the Boks in terms of transforming their attack and helping Erasmus add a new dynamic to their overall game has been well documented and he is a key part of the Bok management team.
However, at the very least it is going to be weird for Brown, who linked up with the Boks mainly because any chance of coaching the All Blacks with Joseph was extinguished by Robertson’s appointment, it is going to be really weird for the former All Black flyhalf to be coaching against his good mate and long time colleague.
And assuming that the next All Black coach is appointed to stay beyond next year’s World Cup, then the chances of Brown staying beyond next year’s global showpiece tournament in Australia should be seen as minimal.
Hopefully he does stay until then, for his goals with the Boks, both in terms of what they achieve and how they evolve their game, should have been met by then.
MAKING THE BULLS THE ‘NEAREST’ BANKER WASN’T WRONG
Making bold predictions is always an invitation to have egg splatter on your face, and that was the case after my supersport.com preview to last weekend’s round of the Investec Champions Cup that stated that the Bulls were the South African banker for those who like to bet on these things.
Within a few minutes of the Loftus match starting it was crystal clear that it was one I had got wrong, with the Bristol Bears piling on the points the Bulls and the agony of their supporters.
For a while I thought the Bulls might still win because the English team was playing at 100 miles an hour and they were at altitude in mid-afternoon in summer - the main reason the Bulls seemed such a safe bet. We saw the Boks run themselves off their own feet when they played the Wallabies in Johannesburg last year, maybe it would happen again.
But in being forced to chase the game the Bulls had also condemned themselves to a situation where they were the ones most likely to make mistakes. They did, and the Bears feasted. The altitude did finally catch the visitors later in the game, which was when the Bulls came back, but the reality was they were well beaten by then and the losing margin of 12 flattered them.
But my prediction still wasn’t that far wrong, for as it turned out, the Bulls were actually the closest a South African team came to winning last weekend. The Lions beat Lyon, but that was in the Challenge Cup, which is the secondary of the two EPCR competitions and the elite one is the competition that is most focused on.
UN-ENGLISH IS THE NEW ENGLISH WAY
Former England flyhalf Stuart Barnes wrote an interesting column in The Times (UK) after the Bristol game that did make me interrogate my initial view of the Loftus game.
Barnes had questioned Bristol’s “un-English” high tempo, expansive and all embracing attacking style under the coaching of Pat Lam earlier in the season, and after the win over the Bulls he admitted he may have been wrong and that the innovative Bristol style is working for them.
He noted that South African critics had blamed the Bulls’ defence for the loss and suggested that more credit should have been given to Bristol, for Pretoria wasn’t the first time the English club in the Lam era had won a game in that fashion. It is starting to become a habit.
And our perceptions of English club rugby and how the sport is played over there might need to change. Harlequins have for a while been known for their running rugby, but they were hugely impressive in the way they dispatched the Stormers last Sunday.
Admittedly they benefited from some very passive defence from the visitors, and that was noted even before Harlequins scored their first try, as well as some quite freaky favourable bounces of the ball.
But Quins were hugely effective in stringing their game together and it did get me thinking back to the days when Super Rugby used to be slammed by UK critics for being touch rugby or basketball because of the high scores and the way the ball was thrown around.
Kicking is of course a big part of attack and it was for Quins at the Stoop but certainly the old perception of English rugby being based around forwards and kicking halfbacks has long gone.
IT IS A CRISIS - HOW CAN IT NOT BE?
What I did write in my preview to that Loftus game was that if the Bulls did lose, it would signify that they are in much deeper trouble than I thought they were. And while acknowledging that what Barnes wrote might be true, that Bristol are just a much better team than we expected them to be, that is indeed the case.
Up until the Bristol game it was possible to give the Bulls the benefit of the doubt. They were under-strength for some of their defeats in October and November, weren’t exactly at full strength when they lost to the Sharks, and sent their B team to Northampton for their away Champions Cup game.
I never shared the optimism of some of my fellow South African scribes when they played Bordeaux-Begles at Loftus - there is a reason Bordeaux are champions.
They had most of their top players back for the Stormers game and their defence was certainly much improved in that game, which they lost by just five points (13-8). But then we know how much the Bulls raise their game when they play the Stormers and those games are invariably arm-wrestles.
BACK TO BUSINESS AS USUAL
Against Bristol it was back to business as usual for the Bulls, which this season has meant high scoring games where they have hit par if they concede five tries. Even at the start of the season, when they were winning, they were conceding a lot of points., starting with a 53-40 win over the Ospreys in Pretoria.
Yes, the Bulls hit the half century mark, but maybe it should have been seen as a warning that the Welsh side managed to score six.
The following week they beat an under-strength Leinster side 39-31, with Leinster scoring four tries to grab a bonus point, three of those tries coming in the second half when the Bulls appeared to fade.
Those might have been ominous signals that were confirmed when the Bulls went into a series of high scoring losses - 43-33 to the Lions at Loftus, 46-33 to Bordeaux and now of course 61-49 to Bristol.
DON"T FIX WHAT ISN'T BROKEN
What is becoming clearer as the Bulls’ season progresses is that the new coach Johan Ackermann is trying to bring in the all out attacking game that worked for him to an extent at the Lions. The Bulls have the same defence coach that they had last year, when they made the URC final and finished second on the log, so it is the change of emphasis that appears to be working against them.
Perhaps the Bulls, with four Springbok coaches being seconded to help Ackermann, will get it right. Certainly there is no excuse for a full strength Bulls team not to win a lot more games than they lose.
If you disagree, look at this as the team that the Bulls should be able to field when everyone is fit: Willie le Roux, Sebastien de Klerk, Canan Moodie, Jan Serfontein, Kurt-Lee Arendse, Handre Pollard, Embrose Papier, Cameron Hanekom, Elrigh Louw, Marco van Staden, Ruan Nortje (captain), Cobus Wiese, Wilco Louw, Johan Grobbelaar, Gerhard Steenekamp.
There is a Bok in every position in that team with the exception of right wing, and many would say Sebastien de Klerk is a Bok in waiting. And from what I have seen of him, so is the young Junior Bok Cheswill Jooste.
So yes mention of those backline players suggests the Bulls should be able to beat most opponents with attacking, ball in hand rugby, but take a look at those forwards, remembering too that I didn’t find a place for Jan-Hendrik Wessels or Nicolaas Janse van Rensburg - the Bulls should be playing more with their forwards than they have been.
Under Jake White the Boks did not play a 10-man game, they mixed up their strengths and posed threats across the field. The looseness to the Bulls game against Bristol might have been a result of them having to chase from such an early stage, but there were times that the situation cried out for them to drive with the forwards, which also saps opposition energy, and they didn’t.
Maybe the game Ackermann is trying to introduce is the only one he knows but there really is no need to reinvent the wheel.
JAKE’S GHOST LOOMING LARGE OVER LOFTUS
Every time I see the Bulls lose I imagine I hear Jake White laughing because it is becoming increasingly more apparent that the Bulls are suffering because of a change made in the off-season that I always thought might be a mistake.
“Don’t back Jake because he lost the locker-room and no coach can ever overcome that,” was the advice someone gave me earlier in the season and I took it.
But while I don’t cover Bulls rugby as closely as my colleague Brenden Nel, I have heard suggestions that it might not be as clear cut a case of the World Cup winning coach losing the dressing room as it appears to be.
There were 12 players who drove the so-called revolt against White, it wasn’t a comprehensive assessment including all the players such as the one that has now done for Robertson at the All Blacks. Some of the other players in the squad were apparently bemused to hear that White was leaving.
PLAYER POWER WARRANTS INTERROGATION
Even if that wasn’t the case though, the whole player power argument does warrant some interrogation. In Scott Robertson’s case, the unhappiness of his players supplements performances and results that by All Black standards were mediocre.
The All Blacks lost just three games in the last calendar year, but one of them was a 43-10 home defeat to the Boks, another the first ever loss in Argentina, and then a 33-19 loss to England in London.
They were lucky that France traveled to New Zealand in July under-strength, but the All Blacks still weren’t that flush and could easily have lost one of those games. So there is some distortion to the New Zealand results from 2025 and I don’t go along with the perception of any improvement.
With White at the Bulls it was very different. The Bulls hadn’t been strong for a while when White took over from Pote Human, but under his watch they were soon winning the Currie Cup and Super Rugby Unlocked. They played in the final of the Rainbow Cup then in three URC finals. Making three out of four finals made the Bulls the most consistent URC team in the time White was in charge.
It is also wrong to think of the players as the most important stake-holders at any union or franchise. The paying spectators are. And my money says that if you did a poll today asking Bulls fans what they would prefer - a team of unhappy players driven by a hard nosed, no-nonsense disciplinarian who guides them to the final every year, or a team of happy mollycoddled players who lose seven games in a row - the vote would go in favour of White.
IT MAY HAVE BEEN A MISTAKE NOT TO GO FOR FRANCO
White may not have won the URC, but he was a successful coach for the Bulls comparatively speaking. At least, he didn’t achieve less for the Bulls than what his successor achieved at his previous big South African job. White took his team to three URC finals and lost them all, Ackermann took his Lions team to two Super Rugby finals and lost them both.
I’d have understood the Bulls’ decision to make a change more if as a replacement for White they brought in a coach who had achieved what he hadn’t by winning the URC and winning a final. Not that there should be any doubt that White can win a final and can win a trophy - in 2007 he won the biggest of them all, the Webb Ellis Cup.
There is actually a coach who was available and in the running for the job who’d won the URC. Franco Smith. Like Ackermann a former Bulls player, Smith guided Glasgow Warriors to the URC trophy when they won an away semifinal against Munster before beating the Bulls in the Loftus final the season before last. Smith continues to get results with Glasgow, and they are flying in both the URC and in the Champions Cup.
DISCIPLINE BIG PART OF PRETORIA SUCCESS STORIES
What might have counted against Smith is the perception that he is a disciplinarian, and after White they might not want to go that route again. But in the time I have been watching rugby it has invariably been the coaches big on discipline who have achieved results at the Bulls, with discipline almost being part of that union’s DNA.
The first of them in my time was Brigadier Buurman van Zyl, who was either legendary or notorious depending on your viewpoint for his Spartan training regime that included chasing players up a koppie outside Pretoria and subjecting them to koppestamp sessions.
Van Zyl drove the success the then Northern Transvaal enjoyed under the captaincy of Thys Lourens in the second half of the 1970s. He was by all accounts a hard man, so it is not impossible to imagine that the current players had they been playing then would have gotten rid of him and none of that success would have been achieved.
Heyneke Meyer and Prof John Williams were also big on discipline, with Frans Ludeke being a different kind of coach but he drew on the platform Meyer had created.
IT WAS A BIZARRE FESTIVE SEASON
The time to be jolly is the time for cricket was how I signed off my last Striking It Rich of 2025 and for a large part that has been true. England messed up my annual test cricket fix over that period with their crazy approach in the middle session of day two of the first Ashes test in Perth, and it made the absence of test cricket in this country over the festive period more difficult for me to handle.
The Ashes just became a bit of a non-event after Perth, particularly as their next game was a day/night pink ball test in Brisbane. The Aussies have dominated those games just because they play more of them than anyone else, and given the vagaries that come into play during a five day game played half under lights and half not, I don’t think they should happen.
So it was pleasing to read this week that the pink ball test has been removed from the next Ashes to be played in Australia in 2029. Of course we’ve had the Betway SA20 to entertain us, and I will write more on that next week, except to say that the tournament is doing wonders for the promotion of the young talent coming through in this country.
And, let it be said, the English talent too - Asa Tribe looks like the next England opening bat and James Coles, just 21 years old after making his first class debut at the age of 16 in 2020, was outstanding for Sunrisers Eastern Cape in their win over JSK.
Mercifully there was no rugby between Christmas and New Year, and my argument to URC organisers who complain that the SA franchises keep engineering that as a week off is that it is a time of year that has been traditionally seen as this country’s holiday season and opportunity to be with family and get some sun.
They do of course celebrate Christmas in the northern hemisphere but it is not the same as here in the sense that their big holidays are in the summer, meaning August. Ask the northern players to play at that time of year and they might have the same objections as South Africans do.
But there was some rugby in the period, with the Sharks attracting a full house to Hollywoodbets Kings Park for their game against the Bulls on 20 December, helped in no small measure by combining the game with a festival and concert, and the Stormers attracting a full house, without any additional frills other than the rugby, to their derby against the Bulls.
There were just under 55 000 present for that game but after the atmosphere at the start, when the game was played at test match level, it petered out a bit, and the patchy field didn’t help the spectacle either.
Indeed, if Stormers fans are to get their money's worth the Stormers hierarchy really do need to meet with the City of Cape Town, who own the DHL Stadium, and demand that as the major tenant they need to be prioritised more.
The Moto-cross event that forced the Stormers to play their opening Champions Cup game in Gqeberha left the field in a mess and it impacted on both derbies against the Lions and the Bulls.
Stormers coach John Dobson also revealed that Adre Smith sustained an injury (knee infection) because of the playing surface and was in hospital this past weekend. It just isn’t good enough.