RUGBY: Barney Spender
HALF-way through the tour, and the South African players and management know that they are looking down the barrel. This tour now rests on the fate of the second test in Wellington tomorrow week. Lose that and the series is gone and the tour will be deemed a failure no matter what the result of the third test.
It may be unfair but it is a fact of life. The South African team has played some good rugby in New Zealand but when the history books come to be written the provincial games will count for little more than a backdrop to the internationals. It is the test scoreline that schoolboys will learn and remember in years to come.
Consequently, the pressure in the series has now shifted very firmly from the New Zealanders — who were really feeling the pinch after losing the two-test series to France — on to the South Africans. And the signs are that the pressure is beginning to tell.
All the talk of referees, touch judges and penalty counts has a certain justification but it does smack of excuses. The New Zealand officials have certainly been inconsistent in some of the interpretations of the laws and also in their view of foul play. Some decisions have been extremely puzzling, such as the one in Wednesday’s game against Taranaki when Tiaan Strauss was penalised for offside when he secured a ball which had bounced loose.
Coach Ian McIntosh, though, said on arrival that the South Africans would have to get to grips with the interpretations of the local referees. “Throw away the rulebook and play the referee” is one way of describing it and yet it is something tha the side has manifestly failed to do.
To give him credit, McIntosh has never whinged about the penalties given against his team but has merely asked that referees blow up the opposition as well when they are guilty of the same misdemeanours. Perhaps there is a smidgin of home-town advantage in some of the provincial games but the test was run by Brian Stirling, an Irishman.
The subject of penalty counts is a regular at post-match press conferences and yet the count rarely reflects the number of self- inflicted wounds. On Wednesday, for example, five penalties were given away for failing to retreat at an opposition tap. In Dunedin, two eminently kickable penalties were reversed because of South African dirty play.
It is the “shoot yourself in the foot type of discipline” which used to characterise the French before Pierre Berbizier took firm control. Indiscipline loses test matches and ther is no room for it no matter what the provocation.
David Campese’s “under the skin” comments in the run up to the 1991 World Cup final aabout English rugby being boring certainly played a part in England changing well-tried tactics. Australia won but England, in the shape of hooker Brian Moore, picked up on the trick.
The week before playing France in 1992, Moore, a solicitor by day, wrote some distinctly unpleasant things about the French in a London newspaper. Naturally it was translated in the French press and its effect was to distract French minds away from playing the game towards exacting retribution for the perceived insults.
If the plan was to rup the French up the wrong way then it worked a treat as Berbizier, in one of his first games in charge, watched helplessly as England won and two of his front rankers got themselves sent off.
So the provocation in international rugby is certainly there but McIntosh is spot on when he says the South Africans have to be more subtle in their approach. The last thing they need is Johan le Roux playing macho man to Richard Loe or Johan Roux chirping the referee.
Unfortunately, focusing attention on the referees is deflecting from the real source of the problem: the lack of on-field though and inventiveness, the absence of any real pattern and cohesion between backs and forwards ad the persistence of blind-alley running.
With the first test defeat followed by a performance against Taranaki in New Plymout which scraped the barrel of mediocrity, the management is also feeling the first bite of criticism from the media. The growing list of injuries does not help either.
Hopefully it will not lead to the kind of siege mentality which has undermined South African teams in the past.