Andy Colquhoun Rugby
Let us pause before the dogs of war are loosed at Twickenham on Saturday to consider the game’s most important personality. A person who won’t even be on the field.
If South Africa were to miss out on their bid for a rare Grand Slam – and for all the bullish talk of England’s gamecock coach Clive Woodward I think that unlikely – it might deflect some of the attention away from the remarkable job done by Springbok coach Nick Mallett.
Sixteen straight wins including a Tri- Nations title have stemmed a three-year- old gushing leak in the reservoir of South African rugby pride.
The performance of the hapless Carel du Plessis’s dispirited, disorganised, raggy-arsed squad against the British and Irish Lions and in the 1997 Tri-Nations moved one New Zealand observer to gleefully predict that the Springboks were following Wales down the Taffs’ mine shaft to rugby oblivion.
And yet, they now stand on the brink of knocking the All Blacks of Brian Lochore and Colin Meads out of the record books with an 18th successive Test victory – the first was recorded pre-Mallett.
If South Africa had an honours system surely by now its coach would deserve to be Sir Nicholas Vivian Hayward Mallett MBE, OBE, Legion d’Honeur, Nobel Laureate, holder of the key to every one- horse dorp from Amasundu Phezulu to Zinkwazi.
Mallett’s thinly veiled secret is that he is simply an exceptional coach who has been able to unlock the door to form and style for a group of talented players. He has an outstanding rugby brain, a businessman’s management skills and, perhaps most crucially, a deep empathy with his players.
At 42, and beneath his beetling eyebrows, he may still look like The Incredible Hulk he was once nicknamed but there is a much more sensitive personality at work.
“I would say that I understand people and I understand how to motivate them,” he said in Ireland this week. “I think I also select well in terms of the team and in terms of the management.
“I see the big picture but I need details people and I’m very lucky that I have surrounded myself with talented people in that department and it makes for a very happy management team.”
Luck has had little to do with it of course. Mallett’s “big picture” includes a playing plan and picking the right personnel to carry it out and then drilling it ruthlessly into them.
“My wife would probably say that I’m too quick to say things,” says Mallett. “I don’t reflect enough. I tend to shoot from the hip but I’m not stubborn and if I’ve made a mistake I will go and fix it.
“But there’s no point shilly-shallying with players. I tell a player what is good about his game and what I don’t like. If he does it again I tell him plainly that I don’t like it and if he keeps doing it I will find a different player.
“Players don’t like it initially but over the long term they know why they might not be in the team and what the reasons are for my decisions. That stems from my days as a player when I was kept in the dark about the thinking of selectors and administrators.”
Mallett’s Monday debriefs of his test team are legendary. James Dalton – the Springboks’ fearless hooker – described the post-Wales post-mortem as one of the most harrowing experiences of his rugby life.
But it is Mallett’s unquenchable thirst for excellence which has whipped these Springboks to a share of the record. If England can be subdued then South Africa can take the record into untouchable territory by beating Italy – whom they play twice – and Wales in their first three matches of 1999.
So, what of England?
They generally outplayed Australia last week, but against a weakened opponent, exhausted and on the ropes, they didn’t have the punch to put them down and, in time, fell to a late sucker punch.
They have not beaten a southern hemisphere side for three-and-a-half years and it’s beginning to nag. But hope springs eternal in England – it has to when you have a cricket team like the one being led by Alec Stewart – and the papers have been talking about the Springboks being beatable and how England are close to a breakthrough victory.
Pah!
England may win on Saturday but that will not make them as good a side as these Springboks. Coach Clive Woodward has some decent players at his disposal – and some average ones in crucial positions such as flyhalf (Paul Grayson) and fullback (Mike Catt or Nick Beal for the injured Matt Perry).
But more importantly his game plan is fundamentally flawed. It boils down to “run-around a lot and you’ll think of something” – which is all very well if you’re a chicken in a hen-coop that has just been invaded by a fox but really doesn’t cut the mustard at international level.
By contrast the Boks’ plan covers just about every eventuality and is to be implemented by players with all the necessary physical attributes.
They have to stop the English back row in its tracks around the fringes of the ruck (which should be helped by the fact that Lawrence Dallaglio always seems to run 5m sideways before going one forwards) and nullify Neil Back’s effectiveness by beating him to the breakdowns and marking him tightly when he joins the centres.
Jeremy Guscott is a threat at centre but he faces the best midfield defence in the world and the tight five are a handful.
But this Springbok team know how to score tries and have absorbed more pressure than Jacques Cousteau’s mini-sub this season. And they have plenty in their own armoury if, for once on this tour, they can get and retain a decent share of possession.
Twickenham will be packed, England will be eager but Mallett hasn’t coaxed and coddled them all this way to see a Grand Slam slip through his fingers at the last.
Scandal of @ Belgium’s football slave trade
Lured by the prospect of fame and fortune in Europe, young Africans are chasing their dream and finding a real- life nightmare. Jon Henley uncovers a murky trail of corruption in the game
The contrast between destitute African teenage boys on the streets of Brussels and the highly paid youngsters of Britain’s leading football club could not be more stark. For Njiki Serge Bodo and several hundred young Africans like him, Manchester United’s collaboration with Royal Antwerp to groom talented young players from around the globe for the Premiership is a world away from their own chilling experiences of Belgian football.
Used, abused and abandoned, Njiki and his contemporaries are already sad victims of the country’s blossoming black slave trade.
“What’s happening here now is exploitation of the most cruel and blatant kind, a legal minefield and at the moment, almost impossible to prevent,” says Paul Carlier, president of the Sport and Freedom Association, a human rights group that is currently investigating the cases of well more than 1E000 young footballers from Africa, South America and Eastern Europe lured to Belgium by contracts that never materialised and promises never kept.
In 1996, Njiki, just 16, was a gifted and prolific striker enrolled in the youth training scheme at Olympique de M’Volye, the biggest club in Yaound, capital city of his native Cameroon. He dreamed of European football, where “the stadiums are beautiful, the team strips are always brand new, the players get looked after and cosseted and cared for. It was what we all wanted.”
Foreign scouts were frequent visi- tors to the club, and every boy there hoped his turn would come. Njiki’s came quickly: an offer from the French club Montpellier. He had never heard of them, but took the proffered plane ticket anyway. He was put up in a comfortable hotel, started training immediately and carried on with his schoolwork as French law required. He was not being paid, but he had all he needed.
Within a month, his nightmare had started. Spotted by the Belgian First Division club Ghent, he was offered a professional contract – impossible in France, where no player under the age of 17 can turn pro. Njiki headed for Ghent with a three-month visa, trained for a month, and was not paid at the end of it.
“They told me I should wait, be patient, there were small problems to sort out,” he says. “I waited.” Two months later, Montpellier had had enough of his waiting and informed him they no longer needed his services. A week later, Ghent did the same. Njiki, still not 17, was alone in a foreign country, without even the money to pay his fare home. His visa would expire within weeks; he would soon be an illegal immigrant.
Fortunately, his talents did not go unrecognised. A Third Division club was only too happy to take him on. He signed a piece of paper, in Dutch, which he did not understand but which he understood to be a contract. In fact, it tied him to the club for no fixed wage. “They slipped me R100 or R150 when they felt like it, here and there,” he says. “I played for them like that all that season.”
Enter another nebulous figure in Njiki’s two-and-a-half years of misery. A smooth-talking football agent appeared on the scene in May 1997 and promised to save his skin. The approach was tempting: another First Division club, Malines, was prepared to offer a two-year professional contract, full pay, all above board. There was just one condition: Njiki had to sign with the agent first. And the contract stipulated that he would be due a commission comprising “50% net of all sums received by the player in respect of activities performed by him that were organised or arranged by the manager or any third party”.
Njiki swears that 5% inexplicably became 50% after the contract was signed. “But in any case, what was I to do?” he asks. “I was depressed, illegal, without a penny. All I wanted was to play football, be housed and fed. The agent profited from my situation. I was at his mercy. I was being exploited, the victim of trafficking. But it took me a long time to realise it.”
Reduced to sharing a squalid one-room flat in Brussels with four other young African players, he found a Second Division club that wanted him – but not at the price demanded by his agent. So he approached them on his own, signed his dreamed-of contract, and could only watch helplessly as the scorned agent threatened both him and the club, Denderleeuw, with legal action and even physical violence unless he received his commission. The club, of course, dropped Njiki like a shot.
Only now is he beginning to emerge from his trauma. Helped by a lawyer paid for by Sport and Freedom, he has filed a law suit against the agent and the Belgian Football Federation. Awaiting the judge’s decision, he is renewing his visa every three months, living on a subsistence allowance and the R500 he is paid whenever his semi-professional club, St-Martens Latem, win a match.
“Actually, I’ve been lucky,” he says. “I’ve played a lot of football and I’ve been noticed. I’ve kept all my documents and papers. I will have to start from scratch again, but I will make it, I’m sure. Some Africans I know have arrived in Belgium and not played a single match. They were told to get lost, scrapped after their first training session.”
Njiki’s case is by no means unique. In a damning report earlier this year, the Belgian equal opportunities board denounced the practices of both agents and clubs as “a shocking new incarnation of the slave trade”. Identifying nearly 2E000 cases of abuse in Flanders alone, the report described how players are bought up by unscrupulous agents for as little as $1E000 in their native countries.
The luckiest are sold on to a reputable club which retains them after their initial trial, but are forced to pay as much as 60% of their earnings to the agent. The less fortunate, dropped by the first club to sign them, may be picked up by another but must then survive on a minimal wage to cover the fee demanded for breaking their initial contract.
The unluckiest of all, like Njiki, end up in lower division clubs, being paid by the match and unable to save enough money to go home.
If they are not supported by groups like Sport and Freedom, young foreign players find it almost impossible to escape the trap even by turning to the courts: under Belgian law, foreign plaintiffs are obliged to pay large sums to the court to cover the legal fees and fines they might face if the case goes against them.
The equal opportunities board has now formulated new rules for hiring foreign players, which are due to be debated next year in the Belgian parliament.
Chief among the proposed changes are requirements that any contract signed must be for a salary equivalent to at least twice the Belgian minimum wage, and that both clubs and agents undertake to be responsible for the well-being of non-European recruits – including health insurance, lodging and possible repatriation expenses – for at least three years after signature.
But many human rights groups feel such safeguards will not be enough. “For a start, these legal changes assume that clubs go though all the right legal channels – applying for residence permits, offering proper contracts and so on,” says Betty Clarck of Sport and Freedom.
“That’s far from being the case. Nor does this solve the problem of minors, many of whom appear to have been signed by clubs illegally under study visas. You just have to walk around Brussels, in the Matong district where the Congolese hang out, and you’ll find dozens of 16- and 17-year-old African footballers who have quite simply been left to their fate.”
For Paul Carlier, it is the role of the agents that needs to be most carefully examined and controlled. Carlier says the Belgian Football Federation is covering up the scale of the problem. “It simply pretends there isn’t one.”
But Belgian football may yet be forced to open its eyes to the misery it is inflicting: last month, the Antwerp public prosecutor’s office opened a formal inquiry into allegations of trafficking in African footballers filed by a law professor, Roger Blanpain.
Blanpain’s name carries some weight in footballing circles – his arguments were the basis for the European Union’s 1996 Bosman ruling.
Inspired by the case of two young Ethiopian players abandoned in Belgium and now assisted by an anti-racism group, the public prosecutor is looking in particular at the alleged role of the agent Louis de Vries, who has supplied Dutch clubs like Feyenoord, Ajax and Roda with promising young Africans.
De Vries says he is innocent, and has threatened to counter-sue to clear his name. But he admits there is a problem. “There is a genuine trade in human flesh going on, and everyone knows which agents are guilty.”
Unfortunately, Belgian law does not cover the activities of football agents, and the buying and selling of young foreign players is also an ill-defined area. But the case, the first of its kind in Europe, could set some important precedents – at the very least by forcing the Belgian Football Federation, which declined to comment, to take its responsibilities seriously.
“No one complains when Ronaldo gets sold for millions, or Ajax refuse to let the De Boer twins go for anything less,” says Professor Blanpain. “But to bring a penniless, under-age African to Europe, allow him to fall into the hands of people that are only there to make money out of him, and then abandon him after a few months – it is a horrific modern-day scandal.” Manchester United, it is to be hoped, will be careful who they sign.