It is no bad thing that the opening round of the Super 12 in this country has been overshadowed by the dispute between the South African Rugby Players Association (Sarpa) and the South African Rugby Football Union (Sarfu). It enables us to ignore the fact that we actually don’t play the game to any great standard in this country any more.
If there was one thing to be said for the Stormers victory against the Cats at Ellis Park it was that, serial offenders such as De Wet Barry aside, it was a relatively clean game. Something similar could be argued for the Sharks’ win over the Bulls at Loftus where, for once, Butch James was more sinned against than sinning.
If we were to consider, for instance, that this time last year AJ Venter was about to take a month-long sabbatical for aiming a headbutt at Robbie Fleck, while on Saturday he won the man of the match award in Pretoria, we might even assume that a certain amount of progress was being made.
But take out a few moments of individual brilliance by Breyton Paulse and Brent Russell — the two most dynamic Springboks of the past five years — and the emperor is revealed wearing a see-through PVC macintosh. Would you give a monthly Springbok retainer to these people?
Take the example of Dale Santon. It is alleged that former Springbok coach Rudolf Straeuli did not want Santon at the World Cup, but was overruled by his assistant, Rudy Joubert, who had developed a liking for the burly hooker during his coaching tenure at Boland several seasons ago. Aged 34 and seriously overweight, Santon’s claims would nevertheless have been laughed off if he were white.
Joubert was able to carry Santon as a passenger during the Bulls’ Super 12 campaign last year thanks to the continued excellence of his first-choice hooker, Danie Coetzee. He was apparently confident enough in Santon’s ability to give him 20 minutes per match of bull-in-a-china-shop stuff that he allowed the Sharks to sign Gary Botha for the duration of the tournament.
On Saturday Coetzee played his way back to fitness in the curtain-raiser at Loftus, Botha gave yet another of the performances that made him the best hooker in the country las year and Santon fell from grace with a Lucifer-like thud, earning a yellow card for thuggish behaviour five minutes after taking the field as replacement. On Monday Santon was axed and sent back to George to fulfil his contract with the Eagles.
It may seem a harsh example, but it is upon players such as Santon that Sarfu has been squandering its money for almost a decade. According to Sarfu president Brian van Rooyen, Santon was one of 52 Springboks contracted to the union in 2003.
It would be easy to blame such wanton behaviour on former coach Straeuli. His revolving-door selection policy admitted 71 players to the hallowed ranks of the green and gold in the space of just 18 months. But the real blame lies at the door of Sarfu’s policy concerning South African players who choose to ply their trade overseas.
To understand the connection it is necessary to go back to the beginning of professionalism in 1995. Straeuli was a member of the World Cup winning squad who became the first Springboks in history to be contracted by the union. Furthermore, in a successful attempt to crush an attempted hijacking of the game by Ross Turnbull’s World Rugby Corporation, then Sarfu president Louis Luyt paid the squad way over the odds to keep them loyal.
Less than 12 months later Luyt recognised that he had paid too much for his product, but by then it was too late. Every subsequent Springbok contract has been informed by Luyt’s knee-jerk reaction to Turnbull’s plans, which were to be bankrolled by Kerry Packer.
In One Team One Country, Edward Griffiths wrote, ‘the Sarfu president [Luyt] looked [Francois] Pienaar in the eye and said the four words which would solve the problem at the time but create enormous difficulties for South African rugby later.
”I will match Packer,’ Luyt said… The Springboks, however, were the only group to have been contracted as a squad — In that sense Sarfu had performed the dirty work to break Turnbull on behalf of its counterpart unions around the world, and Sarfu would have to pay exorbitant bills as a result.â€
So the Springboks were originally contracted not because they were great rugby players who deserved to be well rewarded but so that they wouldn’t be allowed to play for someone else. When Pienaar and Joel Stransky subsequently chose to play in England, Sarfu’s decision to ostracise them underlined the motivation behind the contracts.
Successive Springbok coaches were warned by Sarfu not to consider anyone who thought so little of his country as to wish to play his rugby in another, the consequence of which was that contracts were handed out like confetti to keep players in South Africa, just in case they might come in useful at some time in the future.
Has anyone at Sarfu worked out the cumulative cost to the union of this pointless form of xenophobia? It’s not rocket science: let market forces dictate, let players play where they damn well like and pay them if and when they play for their country.