The Blues celebrate Sam Nock's winning try against the Reds. Photo / Getty Images
The Blues celebrate Sam Nock's winning try against the Reds. Photo / Getty Images
OPINION
It was the arrival of May that former Manchester United boss Alex Ferguson dubbed “squeaky bum time”, to provide an enduring and colourful metaphor to paint the pressures those clubs battling to win England’s football Premiership would inevitably feel in the closing weeks.
May brings similar pressurein Super Rugby, and this weekend gone felt like it heralded the beginning of “squeaky bum time”, as the battle for supremacy and survival at both ends of the table intensified with the finish line now just five games away.
The big winners were the Blues, who leapt to within a point of the table-topping Hurricanes, but more important than their literal advance were the symbolic strides they made by digging to previously unknown depths to win what was a truly epic contest in Brisbane.
It was a win that had all the hallmarks of a champion team, most specifically belief, composure, clarity of thinking and that all-important ability to execute accurately while experiencing extreme fatigue.
The Reds, who have at times this season looked entirely capable of being champions themselves, landed two sucker punches in two minutes to go 31-20 ahead with 17 minutes remaining.
History has shown many times how hard it is for teams to be sucker-punched like that in the final quarter and not just wrestle back momentum, but to do so with enough precision to also wrestle back the lead.
Pulling off both demands mental and physical resilience and that they managed to do it owes plenty to Patrick Tuipulotu’s talismanic captaincy, Hoskins Sotutu’s aerobic capacity and ability to run himself to the brink of exhaustion, and the impact of wings Caleb Clarke and Mark Tele’a, who played key roles in delivering the tries that pulled the Blues back from the edge of defeat.
The Blues appeared to be riding a similar wave in 2022, but the nature of their performances this year, and especially the way they escaped in Brisbane, suggests that the arrival of Vern Cotter as head coach has brought a hardness to the club that wasn’t there under his predecessor Leon MacDonald.
Here we are in “squeaky bum time” and Cotter’s Blues were galvanised - they got tighter, dug deeper, tackled harder, ran with more venom, passed with more accuracy, thought with clarity, scrummaged with more intensity and finished half-chances with more alacrity.
That wasn’t their response to real pressure in either 2022 or 2023, when they were exposed as only having a superficial understanding of what it took to be champions.
On that subject, the Hurricanes lost some of their veneer for wobbling in Canberra, where they needed to exert the same control and patience as the Blues, after finding themselves 24-5 down before halftime.
They managed to claw their way back to 27-19, but they were always battling their own error rate and ill-discipline and a much-improved Brumbies team who, having inflicted the only defeat this year on the Hurricanes, will be thinking they can remain real contenders if they replicate the same level of intensity in the coming weeks.
It was the first time this year that cracks have appeared in the Hurricanes, but one loss feels more like an aberration than a reason to be worried.
The Hurricanes were short of their best in Canberra. Photo / Getty Images
It looked more like a bad day rather than a sign that there may be systemic issues about to be exposed in the coming weeks, but certainly, their match against the Blues will provide further evidence of their mental and physical resilience and readiness to be champions.
That match in two weeks looms as one with so much resting on it as to have the power to shift the momentum of the entire competition.
But that May 11 clash at Eden Park can’t be billed as definitive in its ability to shape the playoffs and provide the most telling clues as to how this is all going to end up.
The other team that relished the arrival of “squeaky bum time” was the Chiefs, who had the ability in Sydney to conjure tries whenever they needed them.
There were ill-disciplined moments in their performance, but the flow they generated on attack was effortless - and when a team can win by scoring almost 40 points away from home after picking up two yellow cards, it suggests they have the depth of understanding about their game plan to withstand all sorts of pressure.
The Chiefs didn’t produce a consistency of performance by any means, but they did produce the best passages of rugby - the most potent attacking bursts that must have a few of their rivals fearful that last year’s finalists are about to hit top form.
By the end of the weekend, the table had Hurricanes one, Blues two, Brumbies three and Chiefs four.
But on the question of who came out of the weekend looking best equipped to win Super Rugby Pacific, the order would be Blues one, Chiefs two, Hurricanes three - despite losing in Canberra - and the Brumbies four.
