Steve Morris : Rugby
As South Africans we perhaps expect too much. Fed a diet of riotously innovative Springbok rugby as the year closed to blot out the uncertainties of the early months, we will look at the coming Super 12 season and measure players in the new year against the staggering successes in Europe at the end of the old year.
As a coach, Nick Mallett has made a great difference. He has instilled pride where a chasm of despondency yawned before the nation. His biggest crime, perhaps, is to have taken note of that Ballad of Blokkies Joubert, that anthem of David Kramer, that avers that there is something special about knowing what “it’s like to dummy and side- step with a leather ball in your hand”.
But then, under Kramer’s red-veldskoened yet startlingly insightful understanding of the power of the green and gold over the inevitability of growing old in a rocking chair in “the old age in Beaufort Wes”, Mallett understands. He was retired before his time. Retired just in the nick – if you pardon the pun – of time.
It is interesting in this context that Eugene van Wyk should have come back from obscurity that was fuelled by player dissatisfaction at Loftus Versveld to take charge of the Blue Bulls and the regionalised Super 12 side which includes them, and has been forced on the unions.
Van Wyk, painted with the brush that inevitably tarred John Williams as unacceptable in the coaching caravan which has traipsed through the halls of Loftus over the past two seasons, is a compromise candidate for the Blue Bulls.
In turn, disgraced Springbok coach Andre Markgraaff, his unsuccessful successor Carel du Plessis and Kitch Christie’s assistant Ray Mordt all stepped forward at one time … and then for one reason or another stepped back. Van Wyk, sacked as full coach once and as assistant the next, finally emerged.
It is both injudicious and unfair to judge the man at his juncture, but it is not beyond the bounds of imagination to go into the new year with a distinct feeling that he is a product of his own determination to stick it out rather than his being the choicest CV on offer.
He also faces a huge task in th Super 12, a competition by which all the country’s players – not just those touched by Mallett’s particular brand of down-home magic – will be judged against the New Zealand and Australian combinations.
And, if the past two seasons are an accurate pointer, the Antipodeans will again be using the southern hemisphere provincial championship as extended trials games for the Tri-Nations Tests which run so closely in tandem.
Mallett, in his turn, will be watching the Super 12 keenly to gauge just who he can draft in at national level to bolster his squad with an eye on the 1999 World Cup in Wales, now just a season away.
It may not be politically correct to say so, but he faces something of a potential brick wall in this regard. The Springbok coach has imprinted a new pattern of thought off the field which has translated into some searing rugby on it.
Whether the Super 12 coaches have the time available – or indeed the inclination – to follow this through at their level remains to be seen. Certainly, if they do not and rely on the processes that have prevailed over the past two seasons where only Ian McIntosh has tasted a modicum of success with Natal, we face the prospect of a national rugby schizophrenia where the national squad players will be operating on two vastly different levels.
If this does indeed happen, we face the chilling prospect of many of the good things Mallett has instilled in the Springboks being unlearnt in the brief spell before the national side faces the Wallabies and All Blacks in earnest.
It is perhaps time for the South African Rugby Football Union to hasten the adoption of a national plan for coaches; a thread, albeit a slender one in the time available, to link the patterns of play together and produce some sort of united thrust.
The New Zealanders have managed to do this with great success over a long period by integrating a winning playing pattern down as far as schoolboy level. Proof of this is the ease with which youngsters like Christian Cullen and Jonah Lomu have been able to take the big step upwards.
As in Lomu’s case, they may have still had much to learn when they pulled the All Black jersey over their heads for the first time – and don’t forget Lomu had to play his way back in after being dropped early in his career – but the basics were so deeply ingrained that there was minimal polishing to do for the real talents to emerge.
All Black coach John Hart might be facing some problems right now – most significantly the long-held fact that putting a New Zealand side under the kind of pressure that England did at Twickenham unsettles them and makes them vulnerable – but he has the knowledge that the sides in the Super 12 will all be emulating All Black playing patterns with almost metronomic regularity.
In a lesser way, the Australians have followed suit, using Rod Macqueen’s ACT Brumbie pattern to select and nurture the national side. Macqueen’s success at national level has still to be proved after somewhat lacklustre tours of Argentina and Europe, but the basis has been laid and the Wallabies will come back full of rugby and brimming with fight.
Professionalism has enabled coaches to speed the process of the game’s evolution in many respects. It has also done much to hamper them.
Selections have not always run the path of the coach’s dictates as amateur administrations struggle to come to terms with a sport which is rapidly moving out of the domain of the committee room.
It is time we started to realise this. The Super 12 coaches owe it to the work Mallett has done and, perhaps more importantly, they owe it to the rugby public.
Surely that is not too much to expect.