Springbok coach Rudolf Straeuli will be well aware that the excuses have to stop on Saturday. The former Sharks coach returns to King’s Park for the Test against New Zealand with successive defeats on the road having failed to raise the ire of an unusually understanding public.
Those defeats came with a hostile referee in Wellington and in a stirring comeback in Brisbane. There were crumbs of comfort in both losses, but with home advantage in Durban the time has come for Springbok rugby to take the next step. The heart-warming efforts of Straeuli’s underdogs will do no longer; merely being competitive in Durban is not enough. The public (and the media) needs a win.
To that end Straeuli enlisted the help of referees Freek Burger and Tappe Henning at training this week, in an attempt to reduce the damning penalty count against his team. The bad news is that it has been tried before and it always fails. The fact is that referees, like most human beings, act differently under pressure.
Stuart Dickinson was the Australian who became an honorary 16th All Black on the field during the Wellington Test. It is not fanciful to suggest that, despite the 40-21 score line, Dickinson’s performance did the one thing for which no referee can ever be forgiven; it affected the result of the game.
And in Manchester at last week’s final of the Commonwealth Games Sevens he was at it again. Faced with a hostile encounter between Fiji and New Zealand, where the stiff arms were going in with the regularity of a Jackie Chan movie, Dickinson took no one aside, cautioned neither captain and then chose to send off Fiji’s Saisi Fuli on the less-than-compelling basis of a touch judge’s report.
Fourteen can play against 15, but in sevens, six just won’t do. Recognising this simple fact, the great Waisale Serevi chose to kick a penalty, putting his side 15-14 ahead, and to slow the game down. Dickinson’s response was to award New Zealand a free kick at the restart, and to play three minutes of extra time, during which he yellow-carded another Fijian, ensuring that by the end of the game there were just five of them left on the field.
To anyone who had watched South Africa’s encounter with the All Blacks in Wellington this one-eyed display was sadly familiar. And when Andrew Mehrtens commented after last Saturday’s game in Sydney that referee Andre Watson ”should be more ashamed than some of us should be”, it was hard not to laugh out loud.
Mercifully Dickinson has been withdrawn from this Saturday’s encounter and replaced with Dave McHugh, a sometimes pedantic interpreter of the law, but one who is untainted by national bias. It is therefore down to the teams to sort it out between themselves, and there is good reason to believe that on Saturday night the Springboks will be looking forward to the unlikely prospect of at least a part-share in this year’s tournament.
For one thing, no team has won away from home in this Tri-Nations series, for another the All Blacks will be crestfallen and jetlagged after Sydney, and for still another John Mitchell’s men are scarcely world beaters. Mitchell is a clever coach who understands the modern game, but his Achilles heel lies in team selection.
On the left wing he has preferred Caleb Ralph to Jonah Lomu. Lomu is a long way short of the perfect rugby player, but it is still the case that he puts the fear of God into the opposition and that if he gets one on one with anyone he will score. In Sydney, Ralph was put into space several times during the course of the test and never threatened to score.
Mitchell’s captain is Reuben Thorne, a stand-out performer with the Crusaders during the Super 12, but anonymous at Test level. Thorne has become something of a laughing stock in New Zealand for his astonishingly dull post-match interviews. But far worse than that, when the game was slipping away in Sydney last week, and the team needed guidance, Thorne was conspicuous both by his absence and silence.
It has become traditional to build up a Springbok/All Black Test as another episode in a proud tradition. By doing that we hand the advantage to New Zealand. Right now some of their players are frightened, vulnerable and a long way from home. Let’s kick ’em. Psychologically, of course.