Monday’s video session must have been a gloomy affair. The room would have been filled with battered and bruised Springboks who put their bodies and reputations on the line against England and won everything but the match.
How did it happen that the forwards gave England a hiding in the set pieces and at the breakdowns, that the backs made all their tackles, but the team still lost by 19 points? It happened because the coach erred and there’s nothing a team can do about that.
Louis Koen was an accident waiting to happen and Saturday’s match in Perth looks, in retrospect, like a particularly nasty head-on collision between fantasy and reality. The fantasy was that Koen, at the age of 28, was an old dog that could learn new tricks.
Throughout this benighted season both the coaching staff and Koen himself have been telling us all that they are aware of the flyhalf’s limitations, and were practising hard to eliminate them. They were working specifically on getting him to stand closer to his scrumhalf, taking the ball on the move and running straight, rather than across the field.
Which is rather akin to telling Corrie Sanders that if he wants to be a serious contender against the top heavyweights he’ll have to abandon his southpaw stance and lead with his left hand. In other words, by the time a flyhalf reaches the age of 28 what you see is what you get.
The fact that Koen had assimilated precisely nothing from his intensive coaching sessions was conveniently ignored as long as he kept winning games for the Springboks with his placekicking.
His tactical kicking, it goes without saying, was also being worked on.
This lack of progress would only be exposed if Koen happened to have a bad day with the boot. That day came last Saturday, when South Africa might have led 15-6 at halftime against a panicky English team struggling to come to terms with life without the ball. Instead it was 6-6 when the teams marched off and the chance had all but gone.
There remained a gambler’s opportunity to rescue the situation. Sitting on the bench was Derick Hougaard, every bit as good a place kicker as Koen, a far, far better player in every other department and, crucially, an unknown quantity to the English. The coaching department sat on their hands, sent Koen out for the second half and watched in mute dismay as he finished the job of losing the game.
It is never the player’s fault. Even Rudolf Straeuli’s predecessor, the bungling idealist Harry Viljoen, recognised that fact. It was, in fact, Viljoen who resuscitated Koen’s international career in 2001, when he picked him to play outside Joost van der Westhuizen and inside Braam van Straaten against France and England.
In the final press conference of that disastrous tour Viljoen said: ‘Our forwards won enough ball against France and England, but our attacking structure did not perform well at all. We practised so many things, but we could not transfer them from the training field to the match situation. I thought the guys at 9, 10 and 12 would get our structure going and if they did not then it is my fault because I made the calls, I selected them. With hindsight, maybe I would have done things differently.â€
Does this sound familiar? Yes, apart from the mea culpa bit at the end, which is presumably waiting somewhere down the line. So let’s forget about it, celebrate the fact that Hougaard will start against Georgia in Sydney on Friday and consign Koen’s name to the dustbin of history.
After all, close scrutiny of the statements and reports generated by last week’s game exposes the blinkered thought patterns of so many who should know better. Instead of
acknowledging the gormless play and selection of Koen, vast numbers of column inches have been devoted to how poorly England played.
Here is where fantasy and reality collide once more. England were indeed poor and South Africa’s youthful pack exposed a definite lack of pace in Clive Woodward’s team, but the men in white still won the game. By 19 points! All this talk of ‘Dad’s Army†might be relevant if the World Cup final were 12 months hence, but it is not: it is precisely a month away and England will be in it.
South Africa’s task now is to make sure that they are also in it, and here’s where things start to get interesting. The coaching staff has attempted to avoid the inevitable quarterfinal clash against New Zealand ever since the draw was announced last year.
Now, one slightly problematical game against Samoa notwithstanding, it can be avoided no longer.
Here’s where the draw actually favours South Africa, for the All Blacks will win their group at a canter and then have to come to terms with a sudden-death encounter against the Springboks. Never mind how we feel about the fixture, put yourself in their shoes.
They will be as nervous as a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, remembering how close they came to defeat against the same opposition in Dunedin earlier this year, and how close South Africa came to victory last Saturday. They have lost twice in World Cup matches against the Springboks and, as the old saying goes, trouble comes in threes.