Not one South African side won a Super 12 game last week
– not even in the game between two local sides
Andy Capostagno
The long faces at the Newlands press conference said it all. And then referee Andre Watson spoke. “I don’t want to be negative, guys, but this was an atrocious game of rugby. When I referee New Zealand and Australian sides they want to stay on side at all times and want you to communicate with them. Our sides just don’t respond.”
Watson was speaking about Stormers 19, Bulls 19, a result which meant that all four South African teams failed to win a Super 12 match in the third round of fixtures.
The irony was that, simply because the score was close throughout, it was actually a reasonably exciting game. The Brumbies- Sharks fixture was just embarrassing and the Waratahs-Cats encounter was a contender for worst game in the tournament’s history.
The Sharks conceded 51 points to a Brumbies team which played for 40 out of 80 minutes and threw its bench on for the last 20 in an apparent gesture not to give a few stalwarts with bottom splinters a run, but to even out proceedings for a crowd that had presumably paid money to watch a contest.
In Sydney the Waratahs and Cats lost the ball forward so regularly that a latecomer might have thought he was watching a game of American football rather than an attempt at high-quality rugby union.
Waratahs coach Ian Kennedy said it all: “The way we played, we’d have got our arses kicked by a New Zealand side.”
So what’s going on? Why has South African rugby, which five years ago was the envy of the world, suddenly imploded?
There are many ways to answer the question, but at least some of the blame must come from the top. Two years ago Nick Mallett’s Springboks won 17 games in a row and apparently everything in the garden was rosy. Except that the fundamental excellence of that team was entirely concerned with defence.
Joost van der Westhuizen, Henry Honiball and Pieter Muller organised a cloak of invulnerability close to the breakdowns which ensured that, however limited the attacking options might be (and frequently they were to give Joost the ball and hope for the best), they would inevitably score more points than an opposition blunted by ferociously offensive defence. When the unbeaten run came to an end against England and when, six months later, Wales also beat the Boks it was obvious that Mallett’s team lacked the one thing which no successful side can ever do without: a plan B.
At the World Cup Mallett explained his omission of playmakers such as Breyton Paulse by saying that the modern game unfairly penalises the attacking team by allowing the possibility of turnover ball.
After Saturday’s game at Newlands, Bulls coach Heyneke Meyer did not agree with Watson’s summation of the game as atrocious, saying that the defence of both teams had been outstanding.
Stormers coach Alan Solomons admitted that it was not a spectacle, but stopped short of saying that South African rugby is in crisis.
Well it needs saying, so I’ll say it: South African rugby is in crisis. Saturday’s game was much ado about bugger- all with, in the black corner, the Springbok backline coach and in the blue (white or whatever shirt the Bulls are wearing this week) corner, the Springbok forward coach.
Solomons seemed to have an attacking game plan which consisted of moving Pieter Rossouw into the fly-half channel whenever possible and asking Paulse to make fine wine out of the few drops of water that came his way on the right wing. Then, when Rossouw had singularly failed to ignite the backs, Solomons blamed and took off his fly-half, the hugely unfortunate Braam van Straaten.
Now ask yourself some questions. When Rossouw stands flatfooted at the base of a ruck or maul pondering what to do with the ball, do you worry that he may kick it over your head?
And when any South African player comes at you in broken play from a standing start with the ball tucked under his armpit, do you worry that he may pass the ball to a better placed colleague? Is there any rocket science involved here?
It’s time for South African rugby to go back to basics, for clearly the best 120 players in the country are scarcely upon nodding terms with the fact that a flat backline cannot create momentum, slow ruck ball is worse than no ball at all and it is easier to control the movement of an oval ball if you hold it in two hands.
Less than a decade ago South Africa had players of the calibre of Danie Gerber, Carel du Plessis, Naas Botha and Andre Joubert who cared nothing for stopping the opposition from playing, but seemed to know a little about the art of going forward at pace.
It is time for our administrators and coaches to acknowledge the presence of those people and ask humbly whether they might apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation before the patient is declared not just violently ill, but very, very dead.