Rugby is a team game and its egalitarian spirit is never more obvious than at those oh-so-forced man-of-the-match ceremonies, when the player singled out by whoever has the short straw this week says: ‘If the team plays well then my job is easy.â€
Jannie de Beer’s quote from the 1999 World Cup quarterfinal is the definitive one on the subject: ‘God gave me the talent, but the forwards gave me the ball.â€
We should bear that in mind before discussing the disastrous performance of the Springboks at Loftus Versveld last week. Carlos Spencer was allowed to run the game because his forwards gave him quality possession.
The lineout mess that got the All Blacks into trouble against England was sorted out, and the tight five more than held their own in the scrums.
It makes no sense, then, to suggest that South Africa lost the game because Brent Russell had a bad day. He is not the first Springbok fullback to endure a disastrous Test match in Pretoria — Percy Montgomery was once booed by the Loftus faithful in a match where he spent his time watching the ball fly over his head. In the dressing room he probably eschewed the ice pack and reached for the neck ointment.
And yet even Rudolf Straeuli was drawn into the emotional claptrap that followed Russell’s performance, saying the game had opened his eyes to the difference between the starting 15 and the impact players. This is dangerous talk, for it compartmentalises players and leads to muddled thinking.
The fact is that there is no such thing as an impact player. Anyone who is only considered good enough to come off the bench for the final 20 minutes of a game, when everyone else on the field is knackered, has no business being a professional rugby player and should consider finding alternative employment. The latter does not apply to Russell.
Last week this column ended with the following paragraph: ‘If South Africa can reproduce the dynamic defence of last week — particularly against Spencer and Aaron Mauger — they can win. If they can’t, they’ll lose. Simple, really.â€
And so, as Frankie Howard used to say, it came to pass. At Newlands, De Wet Barry did such a job on Steve Kefu that the latter has been replaced by Elton Flatley for the Test between the Wallabies and the All Blacks in Sydney this week. By contrast, Mauger ended last weekend’s game with scarcely a hair out of place and his reputation enhanced.
Not that Barry had a bad game. He made his tackles, cut the line on a couple of occasions and generally looked the part. The same could not be said for the players around him, however.
Coaches are always telling us there is a big difference between provincial competition and Test matches. Andre Snyman was consistently excellent in this year’s Super 12, but two poor displays against Scotland and New Zealand have probably sealed his fate and he wasn’t among the 28 selected for the away leg of the Tri-Nations.
Fair enough, but what about some of the players who have been retained, such as Snyman’s Sharks teammate Stefan Terblanche?
Even more pertinently, how does Gus Theron make the squad after an anonymous Super 12 and two subsequent months spent in cotton wool?
We have been reliably informed that the sports minister is no longer bo-thered about the quota of non-white players in the Springbok side, but Ngconde Balfour may be bristling a little now that Straeuli and his sel-ectors seem to have gone out of their way not to pick a player of colour.
Let’s dismiss the flimflam that tells us Theron is an outside centre rather than a wing, and pause for a moment to consider which black players might have been able to fill the shoes of him and Terblanche.
Deon Kayser, Fabian Juries, Eddie Fredricks, Daryll Coeries, John Daniels, Egon Seconds and Alshaun Bock.
That’s seven and a long way from being a comprehensive list. And please don’t tell me they can’t defend: have you seen Terblanche make any bone-crunching tackles lately?
The point is that Springbok rugby is in crisis, whatever the coach and captain might wish us to believe.
At least in a crisis we should be able to go down with a representative team, not with a lily-white cargo of yesterday’s men.