The triumphant Springbok rugby team has demonstrated an extraordinary talent for winning in recent months. It has shown a determined flair, a focused exuberance, that has come like rain to the parched sporting hopes of the hinterland. But more importantly, it has proved that a coach needs to coach.
Coach-baiting is as much a part of South African sport as booing the opposition and overreacting to criticisms of being oversensitive.
But despite the growing appetite for quasi-scientific post-mortems (and media that encourage spectators to believe that their opinions mean something and should be listened to), local sport remains devoted to the superstition that losses are a result of a devilishly complex administrative system and a knot of psychological (and simply inexplicable) troubles that the coach is doing his best to unpick.
It is an extremely conservative thought process, rooted in pessimism and suspicion and resentment. On a recent television investigation into the ills of South African rugby, former Bok Ollie le Roux recounted a conversation he’d had with an All Black counterpart: New Zealanders, the Kiwi said, have passion for the game. But South Africans, he said, well, you’re just angry.
Jake White’s success may not dispel that rage — sport can only go so far changing cultural psyches — but it should certainly abolish the current helpless attitudes to coaching. He was handed a beaten team, coached it, and beat the best rugby teams in the world. The system is as bloated and corrupt as it always was; the fans are as intransigent as ever. The only thing that has changed is the coach, and that has changed everything.
All of which puts a new perspective on the comments of Eric Simons on the weekend. The national cricket coach, enraged (read embarrassed) by his team’s pathetic showing in the second one-day international against Sri Lanka, suggested that he would resign if the South Africans failed to perform well at next month’s International Cricket Council Champion’s Trophy in England.
Simons is a sensitive man, clearly more in touch with himself (and humanity in general) than most other sports administrators, and he must be feeling his failures keenly. But failures they remain. Before White, we might have said that Simons has simply been unlucky, has not quite meshed with the talents of his cares. But on paper, the coach looks horribly alone, and bad luck has nothing to do with it.
Simply (perhaps simplistically) put, he has presided over the decline of Graeme Smith from butcher and blacksmith to tinker and tailor. Under his administration, Jacques Kallis has ceased to be an all-rounder. Makhaya Ntini has begun to drift. Mark Boucher’s glovework has gone from ordinary to shabby. Nicky Boje, already confused about his responsibility in the team, has been encouraged to take on the schizoid role of defensive strike bowler.
And when a coach calls his team ‘gutlessâ€, and is saying it as much to let off steam as to gee them up, it’s time for them to part ways. Of course Simons was right, and at the time of writing, his charges looked well set to lose the series in their third outing. But if a coach is useful for anything at all, it is to sharpen players’ mental and motivational skills, more than their technical ones.
Simons’s supporters will no doubt suggest that you can motivate until you’re blue in the face, but if the players aren’t digesting it there’s nothing you can do.
Nothing? Surely a coach is paid to develop alternative strategies, to speak new languages when the old ones are failing?
And so far this season Simons is proving fluent only in flounderese, the lingo resorted to by coaches losing their grip. It’s a language comprised mainly of tissue-thin excuses, and his explanation for the team’s woes (prefaced with a stinging self-flagellatory remark about the pointlessness of excuses) was a fine example: the top order, he explained, is very young. Only Herschelle Gibbs and Kallis are experienced. Which leaves Smith and Jacques Rudolph. Who are young. And, well, yes.
Simons should be angry. Only incompetents and Rudolph Straeuli aren’t angered by regular, banal, frustrating failure. But he should go and be angry somewhere else, like the Bahamas, on a post-resignation holiday to regain his famous equilibrium and affability.
If we blame Simons are we succumbing to the old superstitions, or do his public speculations about resignation suggest that he blames himself too? Whatever the answer, the coach’s chair just had a White-hot fire lit under it.