Heyneke Meyer

CHAPTER 1

Finalists believe; champions know

'Look, Coach, I've brought along my umbrella!'

- Jaco van der Westhuyzen

'Guys, this year we can't go down the same road that we did in 2005 and 2006. It won't work.' Heyneke Meyer was addressing his Bulls team on the eve of the Super 14 season of 2007. They had reached the semifinals in both preceding years, and lost twice.

In 2005 the Bulls played in the semifinal in Sydney against the Waratahs. The week before, they had beaten the Stormers 75-14 to qualify for the play-offs. Therefore, there were high expectations among South Africans of a victory in Sydney. But the Bulls suffered a 13-23 defeat.

May 2006 was a similar situation. To qualify for the semifinals, the Bulls needed to beat the Stormers at the latter's home stadium, Newlands, by 33 points. In the run-up to that match, Meyer had gone through all the permutations and possible point variations with his players.

He recalls, 'When Victor walked into the team room, I asked him to write down on the board the points difference by which we had to win. He wrote down 32 and I told him that a victory by 32 points on that Saturday would be nothing more than a draw. So he wrote down 33. And we beat the Stormers 43-10. Our tickets to Christchurch were booked.'

But then they also lost that semifinal against the Crusaders, 15-35.

The chances of winning the Super Rugby competition are extremely slim if you don't at least play a home semifinal. Of the 22 semifinals played from 1996 to 2006, a visiting team had won only five times. And out of the 11 final matches, 8 had been won by the home team. The exception to the rule were the Crusaders, who claimed their title in 1998, 1999 and 2000 as visiting finalists.

Although the Bulls' envisaged final destination for 2007 was the same as it had been for the last two seasons, they needed to approach it via a different route if they were to get there. Meyer explained this to his players as follows: 'There was a man who walked down a specific road every day between his home and his workplace. One day he fell into a hole while going to work and he decided he would simply walk around it on his way home that evening.

'But that hole had grown deeper and wider while he was at work. When he took that same route again after sunset, this time trying to walk around the hole, he fell into it again.

'He kept on falling into the hole until he decided to change his route and walk down another unfamiliar road. And that is what 2007 asks of us - that we have to walk down a different road this year if we want to win this competition. And that road leads to Loftus.'

That 'different road' became one of the Bulls' themes for 2007.

Up to that point, most of the Bulls' opponents had believed that you could run the seemingly excessively physical Pretoria players ragged and then pounce. But Meyer remarked: 'I thought that was nonsense. I looked at the fitness standards of the top sports teams worldwide. I then took those standards and simply raised the bar ten times higher.

I remember how we did a bleep test [an arduous fitness test] one day and the guys stopped just this short of our goal [indicating a distance of about 30cm with his hands].

So I told them: go again. But, again, they didn't finish. When I wanted to send them for a third bleep, the players said I was crazy and Basil Carzis, my fitness guy, said that it was impossible to do three bleeps in succession.

'I then called the players and told them to listen carefully: 'If other teams think they can tire us out with running, that's fine. But not before they themselves are clapped out. This is a different road. And if we're going to walk it, we have to be the fittest sports team in the world. When they think they can run us into the ground with two bleeps' exertion, we'll still have a third one in the tank. Do you get me?

'So we did the third bleep - and we finished it. It was a mental attitude. And I believe in the mind, in the brain. There is much more power in your mind than your body sometimes wants you to believe. I knew that we were going to need that mindset if we wanted to win the Super 14.

'But in South Africa, no team believed that they could do it. You could ask anyone what the Currie Cup looks like and every single player - even little boys - would be able to describe it in detail. But ask them what the Super Rugby trophy looks like and they stare at you blankly. So I made lots of copies of the Super trophy and put the pictures up all over Loftus.

'We needed to know what the trophy looked like because we wanted to kiss it later that year. Fitness is important, but it means nothing if you don't condition yourself at a deeper level to do something exceptional with it.'

The Bulls, therefore, had a gruelling pre-season. In 2007 the Super 14 season was at most 15 matches long, unlike at the time of writing this book. In the current 15-team format there may be up to 19 matches plus a break in the middle for three tests. For a top player, perhaps someone who might play in a final, the season was easily seven matches shorter in 2007.

But the short season left one with very little scope for an off day. That is why the pre-season was back-breaking - lack of time meant that one couldn't reach one's ideal fitness and performance levels only later in the season. One had to be in tip-top form right from the word go.

The Bulls' season started off on a dreadful note, however, when the Sharks thrashed them 17-3 in Durban. A week later, the Cheetahs suffered a 20-24 defeat against a hurting Bulls team at Loftus. But a week after that - by about 22:00 on Saturday 16 February - it seemed as if the Bulls had already lost the directions to that 'different road'.

Meyer explained: 'That evening, we were beaten 27-30 at Loftus by the Western Force. Three games; two losses. It didn't look good. The time had just about run out when we got a penalty. We could have gone for the posts, but I don't play for a draw. We kicked for the corner and Victor called a play. But Hilton Lobberts didn't hear it and the whole plan came to grief. We lost the ball and lost by three points.

'We were obviously crushed because we had said at the beginning of the season that we were playing to win - and to win big. Settling for a draw would have been like walking down that old road. But people out there didn't see it that way. Locally, they wanted to hang me. Super Rugby was a short season and we had lost one of our supposedly easier home games.'

After that defeat against the Force, the Bulls had only one game left, against the Chiefs, before they were due to depart for a gruelling overseas tour, which included facing the Brumbies, the Waratahs, the Crusaders, the Highlanders and the Hurricanes.

They had never boarded a plane after having scored a win. And to outside observers it seemed as if that trend would continue after the Chiefs game.

'But, gee whiz, we played! We were motivated because everyone had written us off,' the coach recalled. 'The hooter goes. We're behind. But we retain the ball. We retain the ball. And then Bryan dives over in the corner for a try in the last minute. By grace and with a lot of fighting spirit we won that game 30-27, and we got on the plane with a win under our belts.'

In the two weeks after the victory over the Chiefs, the Bulls defeated both the Brumbies (19-7) and the Waratahs (32-19) overseas for the first time, and then left for New Zealand with their tails up.

'And I could see that the players had become much too clever for their own good. Totally. And the Crusaders are the last team against whom you should have too high an opinion of yourself,' Meyer remarked.

When playing against the Crusaders, the Bulls always stay at the luxurious Peppers Clearwater Resort - a beautiful estate with chalets that overlook water and hundreds of metres of green parkland. But, despite the setting, that week was hell.

The comfort of their accommodation and the excessive complacency in the players' minds worried Meyer. So he 'hit them' with a fitness session early in the week:

'I wanted to bring them back to earth, but the main reason was to test our fitness and know where I had to cut back as far as training was concerned. That pre-season had been extremely gruelling and I thought it would become necessary to take things just a bit slower here and there.

'But the senior players started complaining. Incessantly. Then I lost it and, when I think back now, it was the angriest I have ever been in my life.

'I grabbed the whistle from Basil and told him that I felt like throttling the players. When Bakkies saw this, he started talking to himself: "Come on, old Bakkies, now you have to pull your weight - the coach is angry." '

This particular match against the Crusaders would be a huge one: the Kiwi teams were managing their players far more judiciously than usual because 2007 was a World Cup year and there were still a few unfilled places on the All Black selectors' team list. Games such as this one against the Bulls were just the right occasion to make one's mark.

'If we lost against the Crusaders, our season would be done with. And I would have rested Victor on the bench for that game in any case. He needed the break and I had promised François van Schouwenburg before the tour that he would get a chance to...