It may be against all odds, but perhaps the South African Rugby Union (Saru) got it right when it called for submissions not just for the new fifth team, but for all five franchises ahead of next year’s expansion to the Super 14.
After three rounds of the Super 12, the current South African franchises have recorded a grand total of two wins and one draw, a statistic that would be
depressing were it not so familiar.
It is, in fact, familiar enough to ride roughshod over advocates of the status quo and state categorically that enough is enough.
There is little doubt that the game at provincial level in this country needs to be picked up and shaken. The Blue Bulls have won three successive Currie Cups, but — under their Super 12 nom de guerre of the Bulls — lost their first three games this year.
A polite gentleman coaches the Bulls by the name of Heyneke Meyer, a man hailed as a visionary in some parts. Meyer is having his second go at the Super 12, having coached the Bulls to 11 successive defeats in 2002. It’s now 14 in a row and déjàvu is setting in.
This week Meyer admitted that he needs to tweak his game plan, saying that driving upfield through the forwards is less effective in the Super 12 because defending teams are more adept at taking out support players. It’s almost as if he thought that rival teams would not be so unsporting as to study videotapes of the Blue Bulls in action.
It’s now 13 years since South African rugby came out of isolation. Thanks to satellite television our domestic competitions are shown all over the world.
Everybody knows how the Bulls play. Which brings us back to the point of all this: why should we have a franchise system at all?
The old South African Rugby Football Union (Sarfu) put the franchise system in place in 1998 because it had seen enough Super 12 games to know how the competition worked. Clearly the New Zealand sides had an advantage because they didn’t play as provinces, but as regional franchises.
So Sarfu embarked on a slavish attempt to emulate the success of the Auckland Blues. Later on, administrators and coaches became obsessed with the successful playing style of the Brumbies and everyone forgot that Transvaal won the first Super 10 in 1993 and Natal reached the semifinals every year from 1996 to 1998 and only lost in the final of the 1995 Super 10.
The regional franchise system pushed through by Sarfu in 1998 threw the baby out with the bathwater. No longer would the century-old Currie Cup be the method of determining which four teams would play in the Super 12. Too arbitrary, said Sarfu, noting that the South Western Districts Eagles might be good enough to reach a Currie Cup semifinal, but would be an embarrassment in the Super 12.
Eight years later we have four underperforming franchises and a worthless Currie Cup. So worthless that it was nearly further marginalised by a new competition this year, the Rainbow Cup. The latter has now been postponed until 2006, but it will happen and the Currie Cup will lose more ground.
When Sarfu recognised that its franchises were not working it embarked on a new campaign. Provincial rivalries were apparently killing team spirit so it was agreed that the top 120 players in the country would henceforth be contracted directly by Sarfu rather than the unions.
This idea was then taken a step further and Sarfu contracted the four regional coaches, too. All well and good until the regions fell out of love with the coach. This year, for instance, the Bulls wanted no more to do with Rudy Joubert, their Super 12 coach in 2003 and 2004.
Joubert had a three-year contract with Sarfu, but long before the end of last year’s Currie Cup, Meyer was making decisions about this year’s Super 12. The Bulls dug in their heels and got the coach they wanted. Presumably they also now have the results they wanted.
In Durban there were dark mutterings late last year that if the Sharks failed to reach the semifinals of the Currie Cup their coach would be dispensed with. But Kevin Putt was also coach of the Sharks Super 12 franchise and therefore employed by Sarfu.
Putt survived his team’s failure, but with three successive defeats in this year’s Super 12 the knives are out again. It’s hard not to feel sorry for the man, contracted as he is between a rock and a hard place. Last week the Sharks played in fits and starts and lost by six points to the Hurricanes. Along the way three of his players knocked the ball on with the line at their mercy. It’s hard to blame a coach for knock-ons.
The moral of this story (if there is one) is that you cannot legislate success. What works for New Zealand does not necessarily work for South Africa because there are different dynamics in play. For obvious reasons there are administrators at provincial and regional level who abhor the idea of unbundling ahead of the Super 14. But maybe, if we want success, that is exactly what must happen.