The players are doing their best against a formidable All Black side, it’s the leadership at the top that isn’t performing
RUGBY: Jon Swift
WE South Africans have a disturbing habit of closing our eyes to problems and hoping they will go away. Perhaps this ostrich-like behaviour is a consequence of having to live behind bars in an increasingly violent society, but one suspects that the trait has always been there.
You only have to look at the way apartheid flew in the face of reason, civilised behaviour and the rest of the world to understand that.
Much as everyone concerned with the current turmoil surrounding the Springbok rugby side might hope and pray, it’s not going to go away. The James Small fiasco won’t go away. Neither will the gatvoligheid of the Os du Randt debacle. Henry Tromp is seemingly here to stay. The old flag is not going to disappear overnight. Most of all though, the looming spectre of perhaps the best All Black side of all time will not simply vanish.
Crude as it may sound — and we are not a nation noted for inherent subtlety — a childishly lettered sign at one of the current series of tests said it all in a phrase …”Bokbevok”.
The rugby authorities have, in the constricted space of 14 months, managed to turn a national triumph into a national disgrace. And this is not because of a run of three defeats in as many outings against the New Zealanders.
Kitch Christie, whose ill-health robbed the rugby world of one of its most keenly-honed coaching talents, put it best. “You don’t beat the All Blacks five out of five,” was the seemingly simplistic way he put it.
There is a deeper meaning though that comes through the thought and it is simply this: don’t blame defeat on the players. Like the mythical pianist, they are doing their best.
At the base of all the current problems is a lack of understanding of this from the national selectors, a panic that seems to be born of a condition best described as terminal lethargy spiced with a bygone arrogance and creeping indecision.
There are things wrong with the current South African side. A crippling list of injuries is not the least of these. But leadership must, perforce, come from the top. Right now, it isn’t.
It starts with the inability of the South African Rugby Football Union to get off its collective suited behind and give some guidance on issues which are crucial to getting the game back on track and making it the kind of glorious, spirited endeavour of which every South African can be proud.
A taste of this was the week-long wait for a statement from Sarfu on the matter of the old flags being so fervently waved for a side who are only there because the banner of racial separatism has been torn down and replaced by the world’s most colourful Y-fronts.
It extends beyond that, stretching all the way to on-the-field motivation and off-the-field behaviour. This lack of management was evident at King’s Park in Durban last weekend as the Springboks — valiantly it must be said — ended up on the wrong end of a 23-19 scoreline.
Gary Teichmann, in his first Test as Springbok captain, played himself to a standstill — without, it might be added, giving up because he was gatvol. It seemed obvious that Teichmann and the side he led were playing to a pre-conceived plan.
What this amounted to was keeping the ball close to the tight five and spinning it off as adjacent to the fringe of the tough stuff as possible; the old, and in the context of the modern game, largely senseless theory of subdue and penetrate.
Against an All Black pack that had clearly proved their superiority on the glassy Newlands turf a week earlier in the finale of the Sanzar tri-nation series, the only question that can logically be asked is “Why?”
You cannot blame Teichmann. The worrying injury he picked up from a stray Sean Fitzpatrick knee in Durban might have stopped him training, but it hasn’t lessened the fire in him to beat the All Blacks this time out and save the series.
Neither can there be a real query on the commitment of a side who must have felt like the whole world was against them when they ran onto the field. They merely followed the match plan that had been handed to them.
In this regard, Tromp — a selection that did so much to alienate the largest portion of this polyglot and still-fractured nation — did not live up to his pre-match billing and one wonders why Sarfu risked the national ire to include him in the first place.
Again quoting Christie, who said it best: “There weren’t enough tight forwards getting to the ball. James Dalton could be the answer.” Indeed. Tempestuous as he may be, Dalton is one of the few South Africans capable of ripping the ball away in the tightloose, an area it must be added that the All Blacks own.
But then Dalton is being “disciplined”. Which leads inevitably to the case of Small. At 27, he is the most capped player with 31 internationals since this country’s return to the world arena. He might be an individualistic loner off the field. On it, there is no one more centred on the job at hand … or more committed to the team. “I’d die for the Springboks,” is something he has said more than once. Believe it, he would.
But now, despite being cleared at a hearing for his pre-game nightclubbing habits, he too is being “disciplined”. No matter what the current rugby authorities say about treating the players like men, you get the feeling that the old authoritarian paternalism is far from dead.
Small may be hard to handle. But then so was David Campese supposed to be. The Australians lived with it for 99 internationals. The game plan allowed for differences in the human condition and, in doing so, gave licence to the type of individual brilliance and innovation we currently seem to be so sadly lacking.
It could perhaps also be argued that, with an untried centre pairing in Danie van Schalkwyk and Andre Snyman, it made sense to keep the ball as tight as possible. That surely doesn’t wash. Even against the duo of Walter Little and Frank Bunce with over 80 caps between them.
Bunce said as much in praising the tyro Bok centres afterwards —and praise from an All Black for his opposition approaches the rarity of rocking horse manure.
Both the young centres tackled like tigers, combined like oiled clockwork and Van Schalkwyk’s try gave credence to the thinking that here, truly, is a player international sides are going to have to reckon with for some time to come.
One hesitates to say it, but with finishers like Pieter Hendriks and the exceedingly rapid Justin Swart on the wings and the wily Andre Joubert to sow confusion by joining the line, the match plan had all the reasoned logic that prevailed among the Kamikaze pilots in the last global nastiness.
Suspect as both wings can be at times, another question arises. Why play towards them having to continually defend? It is a tactic which has cost the South Africans dearly of late and one which the coach is on record as being unhappy with.
Surely attack — all-out and sustained attack — would have been a better option. It might even have managed to get the side another two tries to match the three the All Blacks ran across the embattled Springbok line.
Surely, our wings deserve the same opportunities the New Zealanders afforded Jeff Wilson and Glen Osbourne. You can’t complain about weighing apples against pears if you are not prepared to plant the seeds.
It is also no use griping about the professional nature of some of the penalties awarded against the New Zealanders when the Springboks had them under pressure. They are professionals after all. And you don’t need a degree in higher physics to work out that three points for a penalty is infinitely preferable to seven from a converted try.
Fitzpatrick has not earned his record number of caps for New Zealand by being blind to the half chance.
Nor is there much doubt about the fact that flanker Josh Kronfeld spends a lot of time visiting territory on the wrong side of the ball. Or that Zinzan Brooke — such a marvellous touch player for so massive a frame — is verging on the quasi- legitimate when he protests his innocence to the referee at being caught offside with hands raised.
It is a tactic which makes service that much more difficult for the scrumhalf and gives Brooke’s teammates that extra yard and makes them that much more dangerous. One must admit though, that Zinzan does it with such panache.
No, you can’t blame the players. Despite the difficulties of the muddied waters they are wading through and the uncertain air they have currently to breathe, they are out there putting it on the line … and will again be doing so this Saturday at Loftus.
For those of us who carry the lingering sparks of pride in what they do, there remains now only the waiting and the lingering thought that a sea change in administrative and managerial attitudes is long overdue.
What else is there but to shoot the pianist or go into the business of hand-lettering senseless banners that, in retrospect, currently tell the story with such succinct accuracy?
ENDS