As hirings and firings go, you couldn’t get a much greater contrast than the two that happened in South African rugby this week. The Griqualand West Rugby Union passed a vote of no confidence in its president, Baby Richards, accusing him of failing to vote in the manner instructed by his union.
It is alleged that Richards supported SA Rugby Union (Saru) president Brian van Rooyen in the most recent emergency meeting of Saru’s executive council, directly against the instructions of his union’s executive, who wanted Van Rooyen fired. Richards’s dismissal thus removes another pillar of Van Rooyen’s rapidly diminishing support base.
At the beginning of Van Rooyen’s stormy term of office, SA Rugby MD Rian Oberholzer resigned, and Van Rooyen sacked the incumbent Springbok coach, Rudolf Straeuli. It was Van Rooyen’s way of wielding the new broom.
It’s rather ironic, then, that the announcement of Richards’s ousting occurred almost simultaneously with an announcement by the Sharks Rugby Union that it had appointed Straeuli to the position of commercial rugby manager.
Straeuli’s appointment brings the architect of Kamp Staaldraad back into the structures of South African rugby after a two-year exile. During that time, Straeuli helped out at his old club Bedford in England and involved himself in a discreet manner with club rugby in KwaZulu-Natal.
During those two years, the formal structures of South African rugby shunned Straeuli. Mere mention of his name was anathema and it was as hard to find his erstwhile praise singers as it is to discover anyone who voted for the National Party in the 1980s.
Even the Sharks, whom Straeuli coached to a Super 12 final and two Currie Cup finals, were keen to point out that the position of commercial rugby manager would definitely not involve any actual coaching.
Inevitably, of course, Straeuli’s appointment will accrue far more column inches than the dismissal of Richards. The latter is, after all, merely a former office bearer of a minor union, while the former coached the national side to disgrace at the 2003 Rugby World Cup.
But in the greater scheme of things, it throws into the spotlight the possibility of a sea change in the way the game is run in this country. Richards was a small-time politician who chose to cross the floor, as it were, against the wishes of his electorate. Had he been in government he would have got away with it, but, in the less public arena of the rugby boardroom, he was expendable.
Straeuli, on the other hand, brings rather more to the party than mere political correctness. He has a World Cup winner’s medal from his playing days and is still regarded as some kind of deity in Bedford, thanks to the time when he persuaded the players not to leave despite the fact that the club could not afford to pay them.
In South Africa, subsequently, he coached Border (briefly) and the Sharks before acquiring the top job. Throughout that time, he was a man whose integrity was never in doubt. Plenty of people said at the time that he was too wet behind the ears to coach the Springboks and in retrospect that criticism is valid, but you can’t blame the guy for trying.
Remember that Straeuli took over from Harry Viljoen, a so-called ”rugby visionary” who removed the last vestiges of greatness from the team built by Nick Mallett and then ran away. Forced to build a new side from scratch, Straeuli’s teams played with verve and passion in his first half-dozen Tests.
He subsequently lost the plot, but he was not the first and he will certainly not be the last Springbok coach to lose his grip on reality as a result of the unique pressures of the job. Two years older and wiser, Straeuli is now perfectly qualified to give back to the game some of the vast resources he has taken out of it.
He has never been the ogre some have made him out to be and the fact that he has been given a second chance should give hope to every genuine rugby person disenfranchised by successive regimes of mendacious politicians.