test
Steve Morris : Rugby
Perhaps the real test of Nick Mallett’s skills as a manager of men – for in reality, this is as much the job of the Springbok coach as is his tactical acumen – will come from the bench rather than the field.
It is something he has recognised in the build-up to the match against Italy in Bologna this Saturday, a game which marks Mallett’s debut and the first Test of the five-international tour of Europe.
The Mallett factor has already come into play in his assertion that he will give as many of the 21 players who will wear Springbok jerseys this weekend a chance on the field as he can, so expect the coach to make as full a use of the new liberalised substitute rules as possible.
Even so, there will be fully 15 players left wearing South African blazers in the stand … and it is here that Mallett faces his biggest challenge in moulding the embryo squad he has assembled into a cohesive unit.
Mallett is both helped and hindered by the shape of the tour which focuses very sharply on the five Tests with only midweek games against the French Barbarians in Biarritz next Wednesday and France “A” a week later to disrupt this pattern.
Mallett cannot be described in anyone’s book as a shrinking violet. It was not the way he played. It is not the way he is destined to run the Springbok side. But it will take a huge infusion of the coach’s not insubstantial force of personality to carry this off, especially when a sizeable chunk of the squad will not be making the trip to the United Kingdom for the Tests against England and Scotland.
Ian McGeechan, the canny Scot who coached the British Lions to series victory over the Springboks earlier this year, made it his priority on tour to instil in his players the fact that the men not selected were every bit as important to the success of the whole as was the Test XV.
But McGeechan also had the space a longer tour allows a coach to test his players mano a mano throughout numerous practise sessions – some of them acrimonious and competitive enough to have broken all the rules the Marquis of Queensbury once laid down.
The Lions coach had time to harness the competitive aggression and build on it.
This is a luxury Mallett does not have. The two midweek games threaten to be tougher, if anything, than the two Tests against the Tricolors, and the players – some of them at least – face the very real prospect of making their sole appearances in the green and gold as midweek substitutes.
The problems inherent in this scenario will probably not come to the fore this weekend. The tour is still new and Mallett had the nous to all but officially announce his team for the Italian Test before the squad left South Africa. It did four valuable things: gave some much-needed transparency to the process of selection, established a pecking order, gave those outside the chosen elite something to aim at, and left the route to a Test cap open for the rest.
From this you will understand that Mallett is no fool. Neither is he blind to the subtle nuances of Italian rugby, having pulled his boots on there some years ago. Mallett will know that the Italians – for all their Latin inheritance – tend to be stronger at forward than they are at back.
It will also not have escaped him that the game was brought to the country by South Africans and that the legacy of Marco Bollesan, the Italian captain of the late Seventies and one of the great unsung eighthmen of the game, still lingers.
Italy, for their part, will be bolstered by the fact that they have been included in the Five Nations championship from 2000 – something many feel is long overdue – and will be looking for a performance against the Springboks to underline this new-found status.
It is fitting that Mallett has taken note of the example given by All Black coach John Hart – one hesitates to say the Springbok coach has copied this example, he is too much of a rugged individual for those charges to be led – and thrown away the tendency his predecessor Carel du Plessis had of looking at birthdays rather than ability.
This he has shown in selecting the 33-year- old veteran Dick Muir as his midfield general in much the same way as Hart did in opting for the ageing Frank Bunce at centre. The salient difference is, of course, that Bunce had been recognised as a man who could influence a game nearly a decade ago; Muir gets his first cap against the Italians.
This single bit of thinking is perhaps what separates Mallett – and indeed, the Springboks under him – from the herd.
It is the same variety of lateral thinking that Kitch Christie used to mould some seemingly disparate entities into a World Cup-winning side in 1995; an ability to cut away the dross of provincialism and an administration hell-bent on interfering and a lack of sentiment centred on success and unfeeling when it comes to either the players or the public.
The Test against Italy represents, in some ways, a watershed for Springbok rugby; a new start with a new philosophy, though largely the same players one would have expected to find in the side.
But it remains only a start. The first real test for Mallett comes once the French have to be faced in a week’s time. The real examination comes when the tour is over and the coach must re-evaluate his personnel and his decisions for the seasons which lie ahead before the William Webb Ellis Trophy has to be defended in Wales.