Andy Capostagnorugby
The point has been made in The Times of London that this year’s Springbok end-of-season tour lacked a focal point. There was some good rugby played, there was a lot more bad rugby played, but after four Tests and a high-profile festival game, Harry Viljoen’s first go at coaching the Springboks was about as memorable as an Italian prime minister.
In retrospect the half an hour of running rugby in the first half against Argentina has a rosy glow about it, but at the time it seemed less the dawn of a new era and more the posturing of a headless chicken.
Four weekends later Percy Montgomery was still running aimlessly, Robbie Fleck was passing badly, John Smit was neither scrumming nor throwing into the lineout properly and Breyton Paulse still had to leave his wing to have any chance of receiving a pass.
Nevertheless, the shortcomings of the Test team were as nothing compared to those of the midweek side. The dirt trackers fielded 32 players in the course of four matches, winning twice and losing twice.
They might easily have lost all four, not that it would have mattered, for they stayed in different hotels, caught different planes and did the bidding of a different coach, Alistair Coetzee. To all intents and purposes the midweek side might as well have been touring a different continent.
The South African Rugby Football Union was always reluctant to take on midweek games, but having done so they would have been better served in sending the under-23 team to fulfil the fixtures, rather than squandering them in 100-point mismatches against the likes of Holland.
But when all is said and done there is little point in touring in the first place if the squad members are not on an equal footing. For all the pre-tour trumpeting about the largest black contingent ever, one wonders exactly how many players would have had to have reported sick before Thando Manana or Quinton Davids would have been considered for a Test place. Francois Pienaar and Selborne Boome probably had greater chances of playing.
Which is not to suggest that any of the first-time Springboks of colour were not good enough, just that the demarcation of the tour ensured that Viljoen, Andre Markgraaff and co would have known more about the current form of Boome and Pienaar than some of the players in their own squad.
The question to be asked at the end of any tour is always the same; what did we learn? From the midweek games we learned that the general standard of South African rugby has gone down while the depth of talent in the northern hemisphere nations has taken a quantum leap.
The same argument could be applied to the Test teams. Two short years ago South Africa came within a try of scoring a century of points against Wales and reduced Ireland to a bunch of bar-room brawlers. Now both sides felt they had let themselves down by losing games they might easily have won against the Springboks.
We learned also that without a tight five of substance no team can hope to beat England at Twickenham. The English juggernaut played with its Springbok counterpart like a father holding at arms’ length an angry eight-year-old child, all swinging arms and painful intent, but no reach.
In retrospect the early loss through injury of Toks van der Linde was highly significant. Without him the blending of Robbie Kempson and Ollie le Roux at loosehead prop was always a source of vulnerability and the hope now must be that next year Pietman van Niekerk becomes as immense a presence in senior rugby as he has so far been at under-21 and under-23 level.
It would be easy to surrender to the general feeling that Smit is a great player in the making, but the fact of the matter is that right now he is a long way from the finished article. And it would be a lot easier to share the optimism of the coaching staff if they had just once asked an Uli Schmidt or a John Pullin to visit the training field and share a few secrets with the young man.
The impression given by the current set-up is similar to that of its predecessor: that the game has gone professional and there is nothing to be learned from the past. And yet, with something very close to 10-man rugby, England have just beaten Australia, Argentina and South Africa in successive weekends.
Heaven knows, the game doesn’t need a return to kick and charge, but one of the principal reasons for the anonymity of the current Springbok side is that the players resemble actors in search of a plot.
It should be back to basics next year, but we’ll probably get fooled by the Super 12 as usual, and convince ourselves that Test rugby is less about who won or lost, but how you played the game.