The Springboks are adapting to a new coach and being without some ditched World Cup stars, while the Lions are coming to terms with a new style of play
RUGBY:Steve Morris
WHAT we have right now in the build-up towards next Saturday’s first Test between the Springboks and the Lions at Newlands, is two potentially good rugby teams trying to come to terms with the way the game – and the circumstances around them – have changed.
The South Africans are slowly coming to the realisation that the marvel of a World Cup win at Ellis Park close on two years ago is history; a catalyst for the future perhaps, but of little help in the immediate present.
The coach has changed twice since that memorable day when Joel Stransky kicked the heart out of the New Zealanders in extra time. The analytical mind of Kitch Christie is no longer there for his charges to feed off. The brooding laager mentality of Andre Markgraaff has been summarily lost in a welter of foul-mouthed racism.
Instead we have the gentlemanly calm of Carel du Plessis, a prince of a player, but, in many respects, a mere pretender to the throne as a fledgling coach who took over the Springboks without having guided a provincial team. Du Plessis has only the evidence of the devastation of Tonga at Newlands earlier this week on which to gauge his dreams of success. And the more cynical would argue that perhaps he would have sustained fewer injuries and more competition against Mpumalanga, even if the province had not suspended both their locks for laying into the Lions with such apparent malice aforethought.
The Springbok pattern is gradually changing, as first Markgraaff and then Du Plessis have re-staffed the national side, looking for a form of total rugby and discarding the seemingly essential services of World Cup skipper Francois Pienaar, match-winner Stransky, the broken-field mental mastery of Hennie le Roux and the rampaging physical presence of Kobus Wiese.
The Springboks face the reality of the fact that Bob Dylan had it all too right so many years ago when he warned that the times they are achanging.
It is a state of flux that showed some gaps in the Test against the willing but woefully outgunned Tongans. There was the sight of a Springbok side so totally in control in the first 20 minutes that, like Australian cricket captain Mark Taylor, a century began to look like a very real threat.
Then came the almost arrogant spectacle of them relaxing, slowing down and doing just enough. In the analysis, no All Black side ever chosen would have been guilty of such a lapse. The game, as wily New Zealand captain Sean Fitzpatrick is so wont to observe, is played across a full 80 minutes.
The rugby canvas, as painted by the All Blacks, allows no time for pondering which corner to put the signature in, until long after the paint has dried. Du Plessis must realise this and it is an aspect he will surely drill home to his squad before the whistle sounds for the first of three confrontations against the Lions.
The tourists, too, have some urgent thinking to do about the changing face of the game before they run out in Cape Town. If they don’t, they risk the same fate as their lion mascot … a stuffing. The Lions have struggled to come to terms with both the speed and intensity of the game in the southern hemisphere, and the sheer physicality of it all.
It is well that both Marius Bosman and Elandre van der Bergh have been heavily fined for the hooligan tactics of Witbank – even if the Mpumalanga officials were rightly forced to act following the strong denunciation of the dirty deeds by Lions manager Fran Cotton.
Cotton, in his summation of the crippling of Scots lock Doddie Weir, was dead right. This type of play has no place in the game of rugby. Certainly not South African rugby. And this from a man who was never considered a panty-waist angel in his own playing days, as shown by the Lions management refusing an appeal against the one-match ban centre Scot Gibbs earned for over-vigorous use of his fists against Northern Transvaal.
One tends to agree with Weir’s mother Nan on the R10 000 fine dished out to Bosman. A suspension would have been far more relevant.
Yet, sad as the return home of Weir, Paul Greyson and Scott Quinnell through injury may be, Cotton, again, recognised that this aspect is very much a part of a tour of South Africa. What he still has to understand fully – strange this from one of the world’s premier front-rankers of his playing era – is that the major problems facing the Lions emanate from the men in the front three.
There is no possible way that the Lions can win the series unless they sort out their front row. These are, after all, the storm- troops of the game, the foundation of any battle plan. And yet this department of the Lions has seemed to wilt against even the most tepid of opposition.
But then few of their props have had to face Auckland, ACT or Wellington on a regular basis.
Without clean ball in the set phases, even a scrumhalf as agile and quick as Robert Howley will struggle to give his backs something decent to work with in the way of flowing ball. The Lions have serious problems in this regard … and they have yet to face the full might of a Springbok tight five intent on pushing them backwards up the slopes of Table Mountain.
To once again use the benchmark of the New Zealand game as the grail modern rugby should aim at, there are no scams in an All Black front row. They come at you like a wall. And the famed “black blanket” of the tight and loose forwards in tandem, devised by Ivan Vodanovich all those years ago, has been refined to an art-form.
This, the northern hemisphere sides have yet to fully realise. Tries might be the preserve of the sparkling three-quarters, but games are won and lost in the grind of the engine room. The difference is that it is now done with skill and pace.
Through the catalyst of Super 12 and the Tri-nation series, the sides of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa – incidentally, the only three sides to have triumphed in the World Cup – the changes in the warp and weft of the game, if not the fabric itself, have been very rapid indeed.
The de-limitation of one man’s specific task has, in many instances, blurred into that of another. And while specialisation has not brought us back full circle to the days when the first forward to the scrum took up the hooker’s position, and whoever was next filled in as prop, there is a new openness about the ability of forwards to run with the ball in their hands.
No better illustration of this is necessary than the sight of Springbok tighthead Adrian Garvey coming up with two tries in the rout of Tonga.
You cannot discredit the thinking of Cotton and coach Ian McGeechan in picking the hardest men they could find to make the tour, scouring the ranks of former league players for battle-hardened recruits.
The Lions have begun to change themselves during their tour of this country. They have simply had to allow the silky skills of backs like Jeremy Guscott to engage the opposition.
But, one feels this change will not be enough and will not come soon enough for them to make any significant impact on the Tests, although this type of long-distance analysis has proved wrong in the past, most significantly in 1955 when the South Africans had to fight their way back in the final Test at Boet Erasmus – a stadium incidentally not far from an unknown ground named Telkom Park – to square the series against Robin Thompson’s Lions.
But, even in a state of flux, the Springboks look just that bit too strong, too fast and too well-schooled in the modern thinking in every department.
Do not expect a massacre in line with that which faced the Tongans, but do not bet too heavily on the British tourists either.