UJ’S spirits high

VARSITY CUP SPOTLIGHT: Following three straight years featuring in the FNB Varsity Cup semifinals, FNB UJ have had somewhat of a reality check this season.

Be that as it may, Dewey Swartbooi’s seventh-placed team still have a role to play in how the play-offs pan out. In their final match of this season, they will host FNB UFS Shimlas who need a result to finally seal their semifinal place.

“Our spirits remain high and we are ready to tackle Shimlas at the UJ Stadium,” UJ captain Driaan Bester told yoursport.co.za this week.

UJ and Shimlas have had an interesting rivalry in recent years. Since 2015 the visiting team has always won, while the last three years have been high-scoring affairs where the spectators have witnessed 121, 76 and 61 points.

As such, form and log positions might be completely irrelevant when they meet on Monday evening at 18:30.

“We are definitely up for the challenge we face and if we can stick to our game plan, we have a good chance of getting a positive result,” Bester believes.

Whatever the outcome of this clash, the UJ coaches and players will look back on the 2019 season with disappointment. With it being Swartbooi’s first at the helm there was inevitably going to be a bedding-in period, but a solitary victory (against neighbours FNB Wits in Round Five) would never have been expected.

“The season has been really difficult and it showed that small margins make a big difference in the game of rugby,” said Bester.

The 22-year-old lock is undoubtedly referring to the one-point loss to FNB CUT Ixias in Round Three, and the fact that they had an away victory over champions and title favourites FNB Maties within their grasp in Round Six.

“We had too many of those small-margin moments where we did not execute our plans properly and this led to periods of play which counted against us in the end.

“For example, those occasions cost us a lot of soft tries against the run of play and we were often not able to recover from that,” Bester concludes.