Steve Morris : Rugby
In the uncertainties that abound in the game of rugby, this country has managed — during a year which has had more than its share of trauma and perhaps less triumph than could have been expected — to formulate a new equation.
There are four distinct sides to this: an administration which has weathered the storms of public disapproval; a coaching staff which has ebbed and flowed on the rocks of controversy, been stilled in the doldrums of indecision and then crested new waves; a pool of players who have been, for the greater part, largely ignored; and a government which finally lost patience with all of it.
Louis Luyt started the year at the head of the South African Rugby Football Union (Sarfu) and, despite concerted attempts by his vice-president Mluleki George and Natal’s Keith Parkinson to oust him, he stayed on at the head of the family firm.
“I will go,” he said in a manner which raised echoes of Nero’s fiddle, “when I am ready to go,” and returned from the Sarfu elections in Cape Town to brood in his plushly appointed bunker at Ellis Park, an office that former England coach Jack Rowell once wryly noted would add at least 10 000 to the Johannesburg stadium if Luyt knocked the wall down.
Luyt has figured largely in much of the year’s rugby headlines; backing two coaches who — for different reasons — clearly did not fit the mould of Springbok guide and facing down a government becoming increasingly disaffected with the lack of transparency in the game.
His increasing reluctance to speak in public except in instances such as the vilification of men of integrity like rugby writer Dan Retief is perhaps a mixed blessing.
Luyt is a fighter who goes out to win and, in most instances, he has done just that. It is, one must note, obliquely admirable.
Luyt saw off George — another fighter this one — in such a way that the veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle now only has the power of Border behind him. Parkinson — a reluctant candidate in many ways — congratulated Luyt on his victory and retired to the coast to lick his wounds.
Luyt faces another battle though, first in the courts in opposition to the government’s right to appoint the Browde Commission over the terms of the enquiry into rugby. Should this foray into law fail, Sarfu then faces the prospect of the commission itself.
On the coaching front, the hand of Luyt was again evident. Andre Markgraaff was an appointment as Springbok coach which had his full backing. And Luyt initially stood up for him when the Markgraaff tapes, recordings of some racially abusive views by the coach, came into the public domain. This, though, was one that neither Markgraaff nor Luyt could win. The coach went in a welter of shameful tears.
He was followed by Carel du Plessis, a great wing, but whose lack of experience at any level laid him open to the disaster of losing the series to the British Lions on home soil that eventually proved his undoing. That Du Plessis was patently a good person, but equally openly unqualified for the job, did not seem to phase Sarfu. Again, under strong criticism, Luyt backed his man. Again he lost, and Nick Mallett finally came into the frame, emerging from a long list of applicants for the job which included a Cape-based sportswriter.
Mallett’s appointment did much to change the feeling of the players about the game itself. At national level they were beaten and disillusioned. James Small, one of the few immediately available world-class players around, had to suffer the indignity of earning his record 39th cap for the Springboks as a late substitute, as just one example of the muddied thinking that prevailed.
At provincial level, things were equally unhappy, with the Blue Bulls rebelling against the administration and — even though they were the only non-Test side to beat Martin Johnstone’s Lions — faring poorly in both the Super 12 and the Currie Cup.
The Loftus Versfeld players were the more public face of a professional playing population increasingly at odds with the multi-layered strata of amateur administrators who controlled their destinies.
It was in many ways like the San Andreas Fault; two parallel plates forced to lie adjacent and for much of the time in an uneasy harmony, but never quite settled and always ready to produce the paradigm shift which would lead to a collapse of the nature of the Los Angeles earthquake.
This situation has not ceased to exist with Mallett’s appointment. It is, after all, not part of his mandate to involve himself with these particular problems.
But rugby faces the situation where, with the new regionalisation of teams for the Super 12, players from one or other province will dominate in the mishmash of invented representative sides, and the provincialism which dominated and almost destroyed Springbok rugby will bubble again under the surface as selections are made and disagreed with.
This thinking has also almost certainly damaged the Currie Cup irreparably by removing the last bastion of real honour left: the chance of playing yourself into the Super 12 as one of the top four sides in the country.
Far clearer thinking on the issue was that put forward by Natal — surely the best run, administered and coached provincial set-up in South Africa — whereby the sides who made it into Super 12 would be able to draft in players from a pool of those who did not make it.
This would have helped sides like Free State immeasurably in a Super 12 campaign where they confounded their Sarfu critics and performed with flair and fervour, beating Otago at home to be the only local side to win away.
All these things were added into the mix of the equation of 1997, a four-cornered structure of distinctly rickety proportions in some areas and burgeoning strenghts in others.
We await with some trepidation the way this works out during the year to follow; a year of vital build-up to the defence of the World Cup in Wales come 1999.
ENDS