Never mind losing the plot, did Harry Viljoen ever have one?
Andy Capostagno
Harry Viljoen resigned as Springbok coach at the weekend citing intrusions into his private life and media pressure, particularly from Supersport. He lasted just over a year in the job and won eight of his 15 matches in charge.
If the final match of his tenure, against the United States in Houston, is written off as a holiday idea that went wrong, the legacy of Viljoen’s “process” can be inferred from the 29-9 defeat to England, one week earlier at Twickenham. In that match Viljoen selected a huge pack and a back line whose sole task was to stop England from playing.
In his first match in charge, against Argentina in Buenos Aires a year earlier, Viljoen had instructed his players not to kick anything. At Twickenham the game plan was to kick everything. Maybe he thought that he had come full circle and had nothing left to achieve.
The chief criticism of Nick Mallett, Viljoen’s predecessor, was that after a golden period of 18 months, he had lost the plot and the South African Rugby Football Union (Sarfu) fired him on a trumped-up charge before he could rediscover it. The chief criticism of Viljoen was that, if there ever was a plot, it changed from game to game.
What did not change were the empty platitudes spoken at press conferences. So incapable was Viljoen of articulating his vision that the press first attacked him and then looked for something more.
In the first half of his tenure it was speculated that Viljoen was but the public face and that privately Andre Markgraaff coached the team. After Markgraaff moved aside and results, temporarily, improved (a win and a draw against Australia) the rumour spread that Tim Lane was now in charge.
Lane, of course, was a Viljoen appointment, a hired Australian gun with a track record that included being assistant coach to Rod Macqueen in Australia’s 1999 World Cup win. He was one of three Australians to be brought in by Viljoen. Les Kiss was put in charge of defence, Michael Byrne of kicking.
All three of them showed their worth on the training field. At a session ahead of the Test against France at Ellis Park, Byrne spent an hour with Butch James just practising restart kicks. On the end of season tour to Europe and the US, Kiss and Lane were ever-present among the backs at training.
Heyneke Meyer, the man brought in to replace Markgraaff as forward coach, was a mother hen at set-piece practice, marshalling the lineouts and dictating the engagements with scrum machines. Viljoen, by contrast, spent his time watching proceedings from a distance.
There has been a tradition for many years of a “captain’s run” in the Springbok team on the day before a Test. With Viljoen’s aloofness, every session looked like a captain’s run with Bob Skinstad calling the moves and praising or criticising their execution.
It may be that Viljoen came into his own at theoretical sessions in team hotels. It was he who introduced the “moves book” at last year’s get- together in Plettenburg Bay, an instruction manual that players were expected to memorise and, if necessary, take to bed with them.
It may be that Viljoen is a kind of boardroom genius who can inspire players in front of a flip chart. The press, needless to say, were never party to those meetings. The press, in Viljoen’s eyes, were an unwanted intrusion. They kept asking annoying questions like what’s wrong with Rassie Erasmus, Craig Davidson, Jaco van der Westhuyzen, Wylie Human and a host of others?
The oddest thing of all about Viljoen was the manner of his departure. Having been backed all the way by Rian Oberholzer, the CEO of SA Rugby (Pty) Ltd, he met the Super 12 coaches on Wednesday and told Oberholzer of his intention to resign on Friday.
It might be argued that Oberholzer had reaped the whirlwind. He, after all, had been instrumental in giving the job to Viljoen in the first place without seeing the need to advertise or interview for the position.
He ignored the opportunity to salve the national conscience by employing a person of colour, something that had also been an option when Mallett offered his resignation at the end of the 1999 World Cup.
Viljoen, with a track record of inheriting teams that were settled and of walking out on them when things got rough, was given carte blanche. If, say, Eric Sauls or Alistair Coetzee had been given the same unquestioned support could they have achieved any less than Viljoen?
Amazingly enough that opportunity is still there, yet the only person of colour who has been even remotely connected to the job is Chester Williams, a man who retired from playing a year ago and has half a season with Boland and a few tournaments in charge of the South African Sevens team in his coaching CV.
It may come as a surprise to those who live and die on the outcome of Tests, but the results of the next 18 matches are utterly irrelevant. It is the results of the half a dozen after that which count, the ones to be played at the 2003 World Cup.
Viljoen’s resignation at this time is a godsend and SA Rugby (Pty) Ltd can make itself instantly credible by treating it as such.
Whoever takes over will find that the job comes with strings attached according to Butch Watson-Smith, SARugby commercial manager.
Watson-Smith says that there is no hurry to appoint a successor and that the job will not be advertised, but that whoever gets it will be expected to work with the structures that Viljoen helped put in place.
That includes a host of experts as well as the captain, Bob Skinstad, who
is carrying a shoulder injury at the moment and is expected to miss most of the Super 12, but will no doubt be intrigued to hear that he has support in high places. Watson-Smith’s words will also be reassuring for the legion of specialists who went on tour with Viljoen.