The Springboks wrapped up the year with a win in Houston, but they looked jaded and eager to return home for the holidays
Andy Capostagno
The final Springbok press conference of the year took place in the dressing room of the Houston Cougars university gridiron team. The match against the United States Eagles had been won, but it was hard to escape the uneasy feeling that we were intruding upon private grief.
So much so that no one complained when coach Harry Viljoen brought things
to an abrupt end by saying: “I’ve spoken enough for this year. I’ll speak to you next year.”
When the tour fixtures were announced earlier this year it seemed like an
itinerary made in heaven. Three weeks in northern Europe attending to business followed by a week in balmy Houston with wives and girlfriends, a low-key match against the Eagles and subsequent holidays in California, Disneyland and other temples of hedonism.
So it was interesting to note that the few players who had decided to go home at the end of the tour seemed a good deal happier on Sunday morning than those who had opted for yet another week in an anonymous hotel.
If Dorothy had been there to click her shoes together and chant, “there’s no place like home”, there would have been plenty of people hanging on to her skirt tails and hoping to end up in South Africa rather than Kansas.
And yet this should have been the week that the Springboks were rewarded for soldiering on through yet another arduous international season.
The locals were friendly and entirely oblivious to the sporting greats in their midst and the players and officials of USA Rugby were genuinely delighted by the attention. It wasn’t their fault that the Springboks didn’t want to be there.
So what went wrong? The defeat by England, of course. It wasn’t the fact of it, but the manner of it. Players who had been convinced by coaches, agents and an adoring public that they were the best had their illusions shattered and quite possibly their earning potential too.
Watching Joost van der Westhuizen hold the tackle bag on the training field at Houston it was clear that an era had come to an end. For he, Andre Venter and Pieter Rossouw, integral members of the team that won 17 Tests in a row, may never pull on the Springbok jersey again.
If the game in this country is ever to return to glowing health, from here on in it’s up to the youngsters.
Adrian Jacobs has already been damned with faint praise for his performance against the US, but the fact is that, with the possible exception of Dean Hall, he was the only player to make a difference. Jacobs ran into spaces rather than faces and it is not fanciful to suggest that if he had played for the other side the result might have been reversed.
All the talk of processes and of building for the future comes down to this: when the next Springbok squad is selected in June 2002 Viljoen, if he is still in a job, will be starting from scratch, which is a fairly savage indictment of a tour that went on a week too long.