Harry Viljoen and his henchmen need to do a thorough rethink of South African rugby
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Neil Sonnekus
Back in the Sixties a rand could buy you a pound and a player like flyhalf Keith Oxlee was a legend. He was part of the Springbok rugby team, whose two main characteristics were that they had brilliant forwards and they passed the ball down to a fleet-footed wing who sooner or later scored a try. It was a game that was exhilarating in its simplicity.
After Oxlee came players like Piet Visagie and Gerald Bosch, whose number 10 job it also was to pass the ball and to score points by kicking that ball over the crossbar. All three did just that with deadly accuracy.
It was also a time when only 15 men ever wore the green and gold and every schoolboy dreamed of donning that jersey. Every white boy, that is.
Because, even though some of the names were English, rugby was a game that celebrated white Afrikanerdom’s rise from being a nation of sharecroppers to that of a highly efficient but deeply flawed middle class.
By the time the Eighties came around our money was slipping and flyhalf Naas Botha was a legend, but only in his own bloated backyard called Loftus Versveld. So were people like his namesake, Pieter Willem.
By the time the Nineties arrived apartheid was officially dead and so was amateur rugby. In 1995 we won the World Cup. This was due to three simple factors.
The first was the late Kitsch Christie, who knew very clearly that the modern game hinges on a single player, the flyhalf. Everybody plays first for him, then they create their own glory in their respective positions. Ignore that rule and you’re history, of the forgotten kind.
Joel Stransky was the perfect choice. He had to handle 30-million souls’ collective desire for South Africa to win and about as many souls’ desire for us to lose. At home. That was the pressure he had to kick under, and it was all probably going to come down to kicking anyway.
The second factor was Francois Pienaar, who knew how to lead and who could spot a photo opportunity from a mile away. Make that 10km. The game had gone professional.
The third and most important factor, of course, was Nelson Mandela. It can be quite comfortably said that his single act of donning a number six green-and-gold jersey at that historical juncture almost single-handedly won us the cup.
For a brief, heady moment we were the champagne nation of nations. Then we sank back into our usual fractious self again, the rand got real and every Tom, Dick and Harry started wearing a green and gold jersey to the local bar.
And what happened to our rugby? We reverted to that one thing we learned extremely well from our English colonial masters, who gave us the game. That is, the scorched-earth policy, which applies as much to our rugby as, say, our architecture.
It’s a very simple policy of destroying everything that went before. Break all continuity. Arrogate to yourself the beginning of a new epoch. And to hell with the fact that the Aussies and Kiwis in particular, and most other teams in general, hang on to their best players and build on them until they’re well and fully played out. Oddly enough, our two arch-enemies seem to have fewer injuries in their teams, too.
The first thing Christie’s successor did was fire Pienaar and Stransky. But then Andre Markgraaff himself was rightly fired for being an old-style racist. His successor, Carel du Plessis, was an unmitigated disaster and also fired.
So Nick Mallet was brought in. Educated, English-speaking, effusive, he seemed to have it all, but he too was a scorched earther. When the pressure became unbearable he fired the quiet, hard-working captain Gary Teichmann just before the 1999 World Cup. That simple act, apart from crushing any sportsman’s most cherished dream, confusing the hell out of his youthful fans and pissing off a couple of advertising executives, lost us the World Cup psychologically.
Nevertheless, there must have been a particularly satisfied Afrikaner feeling in the Free State when that province’s Jannie de Beer kicked the British silly with five drop-kicks during the quarterfinal; the kind of war that puts women and children in concentration camps tends to linger longer in the memory than the one played on the rugby field.
There also seems to have been a small rebellion after the semifinal defeat. The play-off for third place had nothing to do with Mallett and that match against New Zealand was one of the toughest and most stirring games yet. It briefly reverted to a contest of hard-slogging men playing for that old-fashioned notion of honour, and Percy Montgomery probably had his finest hour.
When Mallet was fired in 1999 for suggesting that ticket prices might be too high it was really just a bad excuse to get rid of him. Although a fine, working-class sentiment, there was probably some truth in the fact that he was fired for being English.
More to the point, he had failed like his predecessors to grasp that simple term, transformation: to change to another form. We were supposed to be winning like a new democracy la 1995, but we were losing like a past autocracy pre-1990.
So it was mysteriously back to an Afrikaner, Harry Viljoen, to run the national side. But who did he choose as his assistant? Markgraaff. Bad opening move, Harry.
Why he was allowed to do that also passes all understanding, but more importantly, what has happened to the side? Well, very little.
The English didn’t defeat us last year because we were tired. They defeated us because they had a fine pack, a competent back line and a particularly fine flyhalf in Johnny Wilkinson. They still do.
A few weeks ago a supposedly weak French team came here and one small man, Gerald Merceron, made a laughing stock of us. He out-thought and out-kicked us. Then he slipped past our supposedly impenetrable defence and scored a try under the goal posts. C’est la vie.
The trouble with Harry is that he doesn’t seem to understand much about rugby or politics. It should be quite clear by now that the game hinges on a flyhalf and that it invariably reflects the politics of the day.
But instead of building on the slow but steady improvement of Braam van Straaten as a stable points machine and defensive flyhalf, he drops him. The result? The usual scorched-earth chaos.
Montgomery might have looked great against a third-rate Italian team, but one can take blond unity so far and no further. And playing Jaco van der Westhuyzen during injury time doesn’t exactly look like he’s being blooded for 2003. It looks more like he’s a bloody afterthought.
Next Viljoen fires a perfectly capable captain and player in Andre Vos because, according to an Afrikaans daily’s headlines, he stutters! What was Viljoen thinking? That “the people” want Bob Skinstad? Possibly.
Which brings us to politics. Someone really should tell Viljoen that the reason a country like Australia is so nonchalantly powerful on the sports field is that it’s a homogeneous society. In other words, no matter how many different types or races of people it consists of it is ruled by a single class. For now down under that is the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle class.
Rightly or wrongly, you either play by that hegemony or you don’t. George Smith does and is probably the best flanker in the world now.
But are we a homogeneous society? Afraid not. The problem is we’re a bit split.
The previous brokers of rugby who still possess the bulk of the capital are white, but they no longer have political power. And those who do have political power seem more interested in forging a party than a nation, so things are about as clear as mud.
What to do? If Viljoen wants to be remembered he really has to take the Boks by the horns and, with the exception of Breyton Paulse, fire the entire team and white coaching staff. Then he should appoint a black successor whom he can groom as they build an all-black team, no pun intended.
In other words, he should let white players work themselves in on merit, for a change. This will not win us the World Cup in 2003, but then as things stand now we won’t even be in the likely top four of Australia, England, France and New Zealand.
Such a move, however, might start forging a new South African style of play, a local continuity that can be built upon and gain us some long-term respectability rather than a couple of flash-in-the-pan victories. But that is asking a mere mortal to pre-empt and help create national unity instead of reflecting a government that is still in deep denial about its own middle-class ambitions.