Steve Morris Rugby
It is not beyond the constraints of fair comment to say that the game of rugby in this country has gone beyond crisis point. Examine, if you will, some of the less than salutary instances that make sad fact of what would have been regarded as fiction just two years ago when the World Cup was still a new phenomenon.
* The South African Rugby Football Union (Sarfu) and the government are at loggerheads on the issue of how the game is run.
Sports Minister Steve Tshwete, rapidly losing his sense of humour about the lack of transparency in the governance of the game, is threatening to appoint a judicial commission to examine rugby administration in much the same way as the Pickard Commission was instituted to look at the ills of this country’s soccer administration.
Tshwete, a self-proclaimed lover of rugby and a former president of the Island Rugby Football Union during his enforced incarceration on that infamous speck of rock off Cape Town, has been less than pleased by the seeming lack of co-operation from Sarfu with his fact-finding team.
The game’s tsars on the other hand, maintain that they have done nothing wrong, have been prepared to help and are now ready to go to the high court to hear what the charges – first brought to light by Transvaal rebel Brian van Rooyen – against them are.
It is a sorry impasse and one that echoes menacingly down all the many and varied corridors of the sport.
* The provinces are in uproar about the realignment of Super 12 demarcation, which they see as arbitrary and against the interests of the individual unions.
Sarfu’s chief executive, Rian Oberholzer and his father-in-law Louis Luyt, maintain that the vote which effectively erased Northern Transvaal, Free State, Natal and to a lesser degree Western Province from the Super 12 roster, was voted for and passed constitutionally.
This is undoubtedly so, but the question remains why the smaller unions with absolutely no chance of ever featuring in the Super 12 were part of the discussion and the vote.
* On the domestic front, Northern Transvaal have lost their president Hentie Serfontein to a sudden – though not unexpected – resignation in the face of looming disquiet among the Blue Bulls faithful.
And chief executive and coach John Williams has had his own hunting rifles turned on him for the paucity of positive results.
* But, more than anything, it is the string of failures by the national side which encapsulates the malaise threatening to destroy the game as the Springboks face the very real prospect on the eve of the match against the All Blacks at Eden Park this Saturday of being wooden spoonists in the Tri-Nations series.
The frenzied and passionate commitment that was South African rugby in the opening Test against New Zealand at Ellis Park in that thrilling 35-32 loss, faded as coach Carel du Plessis and his youthfully inexperienced and outgunned backline suddenly discovered that Test rugby is a different game altogether against a rampant Wallaby combination fired by the recall of the inventive veteran John Knox at flyhalf.
The 32-20 scoreline was perhaps a little flattering to the Springboks. Australia dominated the game and, like Frank Bunce did for the All Blacks, punched great holes in the South African line.
Du Plessis has probably been more guilty of naivety than anything else, given his total lack of experience in the job when he was catapulted into the position through the sudden resignation of the glowering Andre Markgraaff.
Markgraaff had started to get some momentum going in a side decimated by the axing of some of this country’s best players, but in the outpourings of his racially-biased thinking, there also lay the seeds of a psychology that was as inward-looking as that of Kitch Christie was focused outward.
Du Plessis, it would seem, has not shed that psychological ballast and, introvert that he may be, has added the unwanted extra burden of refusing to either recognise or admit his short-term mistakes in the clouded belief that things will come right in the long term.
His wins over the B-graders of Tonga and a demotivated British Lions side with the series already won, do not make for a great record of either selectorial insight or pers-picacity of planning.
He has, in the analysis, handled his players very badly, from the summary dismissal of Kobus Wiese and Hennie le Roux to dragging a barely-recovered and brittle Japie Mulder on a trip Down Under that was aborted for the Gauteng centre without him having so much as sat on the bench.
There has also been the messy way Andre Joubert has been treated. Quite rightly, the Rolls-Royce of fullbacks was not prepared to go to New Zealand and Australia to sit on the bench for Russell Bennett, whose claims as Joubert’s successor are evident but positionally far from rounded at this stage of his career.
Du Plessis first left Joubert behind, then tried to persuade him to join the touring party following the injury to Danie van Schalkwyk against Australia. Joubert most likely gave the coach a similar answer to his initial reaction and Joe Gillingham was called up for bench duty instead.
The bench has featured strongly in the way Du Plessis has handled matters. James Small has had to suffer the indignity of earning his record 40th Springbok cap as a substitute. And what a difference he made when he was allowed on, initiating the try which saved some South African face in the Australian debacle.
Henry Honiball, rightly one feels, discarded at flyhalf for the kicking abilities of Jannie de Beer, was also left with Small on the sidelines when the team was crying out for an inside centre capable of his scything tackles.
Honiball had to sit and watch as the Springbok backline lurched and leaked from crisis to crisis as the Wallaby horde descended on them.
There are others too. Adrian Garvey has belatedly made it back as a substitute, his thinking abilities and mobility around the park seemingly not good enough to earn him his rightful place ahead of either Dawie Theron or Marius Hurter.
Fritz van Heerden may also have some cause for dissatisfaction, given the form of the preferred lock pairing of an out-of-form Mark Andrews and the non-existent presence of Krynauw Otto.
Small and Honiball are back this Saturday in a team that can hardly approach a meeting with the All Blacks on their home turf with anything but a great deal of apprehension. They are, in short, more likely to get a hiding than to earn any unexpected laurels.