RUGBY: Jon Swift
IT is perhaps something to be thankful for that the rugby season has swung back into the business of Currie Cup and the rude awakening of the test arena is, for a while at least, behind us.
It will, until the tours of Argentina and France and the single international against Wales shortly before Christmas, save us from some of the muddled thinking and sincerely spoken inanities that have characterised the game at national level of late.
Chief of these has been the assumption on the part of our national coach and manager, Andre Markgraaff, that he speaks with oracular powers and that what he mouths should be taken as writ. He is on record as saying that the selection of recent Springbok sides has been aimed at building the nucleus for the team which is to defend the World Cup in Wales in three years’ time.
Markgraaff is also on record as saying: “My approach to selections is conservative. There will be time to blood the young players against Argentina.”
He has some defence for the second statement. It is a logical approach to the process of change that is inherent in the ethos of sport where the young timelessly chase out the old and the heartbeat of the game hardly falters.
But surely, the first recorded assumption is built on a premise —admittedly one made shaky by the long list of injuries — that winning the World Cup was the terminus rather than the start of the journey.
It has to be pointed out that a 10cm stretch of the fingers by Abdul Benazzi in the rain-sodden semi- final against France in Durban, or the marginal miscalculation that swayed the Andrew Mehrtens’s drop goal attempt past the posts in the tumultuous final against New Zealand at Ellis Park, added up to the difference between triumph and tears. They are margins too small for the arrogance of assuming that the All Blacks are not the best side in the world. Or, one might add, the basis for experimentation.
Quite simply, you cannot pick anything but the strongest side against teams like the All Blacks and Wallabies. To suggest that this is the time for experimentation is to stretch credibility beyond the imagination of even a Hollywood sci-fi producer. It is, in short, arrant nonsense.
So, one suspects, is Markgraaff’s assumption that Springbok backline play has declined dramatically in the last five years, as he so emphatically claims. True, we do not have another Danie Gerber right now, but there are players such as Jeremy Thomson and Dick Muir. And, it must be said, a James Small left to watch test matches from the stands.
One would suspect that the decision by the South African Rugby Football Union to bolster Markgraaff’s management team by bringing in Hugh Reece-Edwards and Carel du Plessis as backline coaches is based as much on underpinning Markgraaff’s obfustication of the true state of rugby union as it stands, as it is of dire necessity.
Reece-Edwards and Du Plessis are both representative of all that can be good about South African rugby behind the pack; inventive and aggressive players of merit and surely to prove assets to the game at top level in the run-up to Cardiff 1999. Their joint appointment is to be applauded.
So too is that of Boland coach Nick Mallett to work with the forwards. A bruisingly physical eighthman in his own playing days, he has the added advantage of having been steeped in the French game as a top player in the Gallic league. It is a mix which can only aid a national side which has sometimes lacked not just the answers, but the questions.
But to the business currently on hand, the Currie Cup, where Markgraaff and his three new assistants must focus their attention.
All three can do worse than concentrate on what one of Markgraaff’s predecessors, Ian MacIntosh, is doing with the Natal side. Here is a team that scrums with passion, runs with commitment and flair, a unit of very diverse entities that takes the knocks and yet still manages to play the game as if they are truly enjoying it.
It is also somewhat surprising, given the problems which have beset the national selectors, that Cabous van der Westhuizen has not been given the opportunity to at least sit on the bench for a test.
His three-try haul in Natal’s second half devastation of Eastern Province was central to the 53-9 victory, gave the hirsute winger a share of the provincial try-scoring record at 80 crossings of opposition lines and reconfirmed the King’s Park crew as favourites for the Currie Cup.
The same adventurous approach is true of Free State and, while one would hesitate to applaud the sometimes pugilistic approach among the forwards which led to Jaco Coetzee playing less than the scheduled 80 minutes in last weekend’s 25-16 win over Western Province, it is a tragedy that the boys from Bloemfontein did not qualify for the Super 12 last time round.
Northern Transvaal continue to do what they have always done best; grind away up front and then let the backs go. The lessons the late Brigadier Buurman van Zyl ingrained into the provincial psyche have not been forgotten. It is an even money bet — and a good one — that Northerns will be in the final.
Of Transvaal, admittedly hampered by injuries in key positions, the less said right now the better. This is a combination in disarray as the frantic scrabble to edge out the coalminers from South Eastern Transvaal so clearly showed.
But there is too much talent for this state of affairs to persist and the team will be back, though one suspects that this season is too far gone for any miracles.
Still, the provincial competition is the arena for identifying the seeds of the squad for Wales. For, with the depth of numbers and the fierceness of the challenge for the cup, it would seem impossible that this country cannot always pick a side to take on the world. The competition cannot be that brittle. The evidence of South Eastern Transvaal would show eloquently that this is not so.
And, hopefully, our national brains trust will use the evidence on display and the talent at hand without stirring more mud into the already troubled waters with yet more excuses.