LIONS PREVIEW: Currie Cup focus may bring short term gain, but concerns over long term success

A massive gamble which didn’t pay off last year and the hope that a squad is older and wiser will send the Lions into their Vodacom United Rugby Championship season this year with a lot of optimism, but will it hold out until the end of the season?

A lot has been made of the Lions desire to win the Currie Cup and play many of their URC stars in the competition while other URC franchises in South Africa opted for younger players and often took big scores for their efforts.

But the Lions gambled big, and lost in the dying minutes for a second year running. And while their focus on the Currie Cup is likely to give them a good start - their entire squad has had more than a few games going into the URC, they will be hoping it isn’t another false dawn like last season when they faded badly in the second half after starting superbly in the beginning.

We all remember the 50 points they put on Edinburgh in the opening game of the tournament and given their form in the Currie Cup there is every chance this can happen again as they head to Cardiff on Saturday night for their opening fixture.

Cardiff have lost coach Matt Sherrat to the Welsh national team, and Corniel van Zyl - a familiar face for rugby fans locally - is interim coach.

That may help the Lions short term, but the bigger concerns are the same that have been there for the past few years.

Coach Ivan van Rooyen was under a lot of pressure last season after missing out once again on the top eight and finishing in the bottom five of the competition. 

Despite being in the job for six years and having only a 42 per cent win record, somehow the brains trust at the Lions decided to go for another season with him and his coaching team, hoping that somehow this time it will be different.

Lions fans will be wondering what will change, and if an extra year for some talented players may be enough, but certainly there was more than enough evidence for a change, and professional sporting environments are never as forgiving as this.

Still, these are the cards the Lions have dealt themselves and they have a solid squad, even though they have lost the likes of Edwill van der Merwe in the off-season to the Sharks. Their signings of Angelo Davids and Eduan Keyter are both players with a point to prove and will give them some strike power out wide.

But the Lions problems have never been about putting together a good attack, but rather their consistency through the season. The Currie Cup minutes caught up with them last season in the second half and may well do so again, unless they adopt a new strategy in terms of player rotation.

They don’t have the depth some of their counterparts in the URC have and are still devoid of a sponsor going into the season. All that will play a part when the travelling starts and those little extras that well-funded sides can provide their players make a bit of a difference.

Van Rooyen believes their approach will pay dividends, especially early on in the tour.

“Yeah, I think it's been going well. We've obviously had a split pre-season, so some of the guys had a short pre-season into the Currie Cup. To get them playing a little bit, get them minutes up, get them into form.

“And then there was also an additional group that had about eight weeks of old school pre-season where we laid a good foundation. The last two games we've entered some of them. We've still got about 15, 16 guys out injured or not playing. So 95 per cent of them should be back before December. But I think it's good. We honed in on a lot of deep basics, worked really hard on fundamentals and game model, how we wanted to play.

“The majority of the healthy group played the last two weekends in the Currie Cup. So we're really, really excited about the URC to be honest”

That excitement is always there at the beginning of the season. The URC however, is a marathon and not a sprint, and it will be interesting to see how the Lions cope with the unexpected setbacks and the time of their top players in action.

Unless they find a way to manage this better than last year, a top eight placing may be the best they can hope for.