Steve Morris : Rugby
There is a distinct feeling abroad that South African rugby, while it has moved up a step on the international level, is suffering from stress fractures at home.
It is amazing that the only coach the Blue Bulls could settle on was Eugene van Wyk, a man they had already rejected in the powerful position, and that Andre Markgraaff, Carel du Plessis, Ray Mordt and Hugh Reece-Edwards would all have shied away from taking over what used to be the most powerful province in this country.
On top of this, there has been the vocal and public dissatisfaction voiced by the Pretoria Springboks over the way the union is being run. Interesting that this should have come while they were on tour with the Springboks under Nick Mallett.
This resentment boiled over at the beginning of last season when the Blue Bulls players – or the men of Northern Transvaal as they were then – rebelled against the union’s chief executive officer and coach, John Williams. Williams, the former Springbok lock dubbed the Jolly Jumper by Willie John McBride’s 1974 British Lions, retreated in something approaching disarray.
Kitch Christie was installed and, once the players had signed their contracts, sacked. The old order returned to run things at Loftus Versfled.
It was, not to put too fine a point on it, not a marriage with the blessing of heaven. The players knew it and the bubbling feelings of discontent remained simmering, an explosive mix not helped by a season of little real distinction other than beating Martin Johnson’s touring British Lions by playing a brand of rugby that Carel du Plessis – then in the Springbok hotseat – could neither recognise nor seemingly fathom.
The rumblings from the Blue Bulls on tour are indicative of a greater malaise in rugby than just unhappiness with their treatment at home. Mallett has the solid nous to treat them like men rather than as chattels.
As a coach, he knows he has the unquestionable right to hire and fire by making the selections he thinks are most valuable. But he has also applied the basic logic of man management in that, if you treat someone as both a responsible adult and a respected member of the human race, things work a lot more easily.
It has also shown the widening gulf between rugby at the highest level and that on the next rung down of the increasingly complicated ladder. At Springbok level, the focus is simpler, no matter how tough the getting there or the opposition to be faced down.
With the advent of regionalised Super 12 teams and all the in-built provincialism and frustrations that this concoction threatens to serve up, the point of aim becomes ever more clouded. This can only serve to heighten the frustrations of those players who have made the Currie Cup their goal only to find that the venerable competition has been downgraded and is now to serve as something akin to a feeding scheme for the television money poured into the South African Rugby Football Union coffers.
With the re-election of Louis Luyt to head the administration of the game in this country already part of history – and the mandate to run the game the way he sees fit only subject to the eventual outcome of the court’s decision on the Browde Commission’s right to examine rugby governance in detail – the players have been left largely with no say.
At least on the surface. The Bulls have begun to show that this will not always be the case. The days of you play, we pay, cannot last forever.
It is something that the game’s administrators had better heed now before the cracks become real chasms.