The hardest thing in sport is to lose when you know you should have won. This week Ernie Els is attempting to win his second major championship in a row, surfing on a wave of confidence. But what if he had lost the playoff for the Open Championship last month? He would be questioning life’s fundamentals like, is pursuing a small dimpled ball around a meadow a proper job for a grown man?
Springbok coach Rudolf Straeuli and his charges have had a week to recover from their first home defeat under the new regime. They have analysed the game from every angle. They have been suitably angry about the pitch invasion of Pieter van Zyl, a little embarrassed about their porous defence, and they have emerged upbeat about the progression shown by the team during this year’s Tri-Nations.
The fact remains, however, that they lost when they should have won. Good teams don’t do that. Good teams find a way. Amid all the rancour about refereeing decisions and squandered opportunities, not enough credit has gone the way of the All Blacks who won a game they should have lost. They won it by taking their chances and by defending their line quite heroically. In other words, they played Test rugby.
Afterwards Straeuli admitted: ”The match was close, but we must not fall into the trap of being happy with playing well and not winning.” Exactly. One of the reasons that Straeuli has been given a smooth ride despite three successive defeats is that he speaks the truth.
Under Harry Viljoen all the talk was of processes and structures and, following defeat by England at Twickenham last year, Bob Skinstad was even heard to say: ”Winning is not everything.” But at Test level it is and Straeuli, a graduate of the school of hard knocks and a man who may suspect that he has a World Cup winner’s medal despite the fact that his team weren’t the best in the competition, knows it.
So Straeuli’s revisionist words later in the week have to be taken with a pinch of salt. He said: ”We have played some really exciting rugby in this year’s Tri-Nations and I am excited with the potential in this young team.” What he is really saying is that there is a long way to go and that, if the Springboks lose to Australia on Saturday, a few players will have to play mighty well in the Currie Cup to make it on to the end-of-season tour to Europe.
This week both teams have chosen to prepare for the Ellis Park Test in Durban, and while this has become the norm for Australian sides in an attempt to cheat the altitude problem, it feels wrong that the Springboks should stay away from Johannesburg until the last moment. Win, and it will be forgotten, lose, and it may be used as a stick to beat both players and management.
But as ever during this maddening tournament, there are as many arguments in favour of a South African win as there are in favour of defeat. Number one is that, for whatever reason, they simply don’t lose too often at Ellis Park. Number two is that Straeuli is right; they have played good rugby this year. And number three is that they are due a bit of good luck.
That is something that no coach can instil, unless he takes the Gary Player approach of: ”The harder I practise the luckier I get.” Yet golf, where this article began, is mercifully free of an ever-present independent arbiter. Imagine if it were not. ”Sorry, Tiger, that birdie doesn’t count, you took the putt from the wrong place.” Or: ”Drop the ball 10m back, your caddie was standing offside.”
In rugby, the referee is a necessary evil. If he were not there the ”game for hooligans, played by gentlemen”, would degenerate into an unsightly brawl and Van Zyl would have as much chance of captaining his country as Corné Krige.
But it is one thing to stop the game turning into a fight, quite another to simply stop the game. The International Rugby Board has fought long and hard to avoid intrusive tech- nology but, as with cricket where South Africa pioneered the third umpire system, they will soon have to admit that the referee needs help.
There is a brief window of opportunity between Saturday’s match and the beginning of the Northern hemisphere season for the game’s ruling body to make a decision. They are rightly apprehensive about slowing down the game, but when careers of both coaches and players are at stake and when referees become fearful of public retribution the time has come to act.
Act now and next year’s World Cup could take the game to another level and attract a new generation of fans. Dither and the game will die a little more.