Six of the Australian squad who did not participate in last Saturday’s 49-0 destruction of Fiji were sent to South Africa early to acclimatise ahead of this week’s opening Tri-Nations Test in Cape Town. Apparently they were warned to stay out of trouble.
It was, after all, a Cape Town taxi that was trashed by partying Brumbies after a Super 12 fixture against the Stormers a few years ago. Cape Town was also the venue for the misbehaviour of scrumhalf Matt Henjak last year. The miscreant was brought to book by management and became the first Wallaby in history to be sent home from a tour.
So it is not as if Australia do not have experience of troublesome extracurricular activities, but when their fellow Wallabies joined the six voortrekkers this week it must have been a lulu of a debriefing session.
”Hey guys, listen to this,” they might have said. ”The Springbok coach is gonna get fired because his bodyguard punched a reporter in a pub toilet. And he’s not allowed to say sorry to President Thabo Mbeki because he didn’t ask his boss for permission first. And the government is gonna pick the team from now on and there will be only a small quota of white players allowed.”
Rugby teams love touring this country because the game is front and back page news over here, at least in the white press. In Australia there are two other games played with an oval ball that take precedence over rugby union. If John Connolly, coach of the Wallabies, were to request an audience with the head of the Australian government, he’d be told exactly where to get off.
And yet the Wallabies are the only team to have won the Rugby World Cup twice and, even after a disastrous Super 14 campaign for the Australian sides, are capable of punching well above their weight. Partly it’s because more than 80% of the Australian population plays a sport of some kind. Over there they have sports academies aimed at maximising playing potential. In South Africa, by contrast, we have the parliamentary portfolio committee on sport chairperson, the voluble Butana Khompela.
It is an unfortunate side-effect of the growing pains of our new democracy that demographics are more important than excellence. In the greater scheme of things, this week’s Test is utterly irrelevant. Far more germane is Khompela’s reference to the ”shocking statistics” of the lack of transformation in the Super 14 squads.
He noted that there were five brown and two black players in the Bulls team, four brown and one black in the Cheetahs team, four brown and two black in the Lions team and five brown and zero black players in the Stormers team. This week the Springboks will take the field with just three ”brown” players: Gurthro Steenkamp, Ashwin Willemse and JP Pietersen.
The only ”black” player who might have played is Akona Ndungane and his omission will take some explaining to the portfolio committee. According to Saru, Ndungane has been sent on a two-week ”intensive speed programme”, meaning that he will be available only for the away leg of the Tri-Nations.
It is an often-quoted mantra in sport that there is no substitute for pace and that it is the one thing that cannot be taught. If that is the case, what the hell do the Springbok management team think they are doing? It would be highly dubious if Ndungane were packed off for a speed programme in January, but not in June, when he has just been included in the 30-man Tri-Nations squad.
This is the same player who has a Super 14 winner’s medal in his trophy cabinet and who has scored 50 tries in four seasons of first-class rugby. It makes no sense until you remember the fate that befell Lawrence Sephaka. The South African ”Players Player” of the year in 2002 has spent the last three years in and out of ”strength and conditioning” programmes, and now he can’t make even the Lions team.
If Jake White had been allowed to meet Mbeki this week, it would have been interesting to know his hypothetical answers to the previous hypothetical questions. Alas, we shall never know, and any chance of the president appearing in print wearing a green and gold jersey with the number two on the back seems to have gone the way of the 12% wage increase.
Which leaves us with the small matter of a Test match at Newlands. Almost exactly a year ago, at the same venue, the Boks lost to France 24 hours after a press conference to announce that the extension of White’s contract was cancelled. Two weeks later, in Brisbane, they lost 49-0 and it looked odds-on that there would be a new coach in place before the end of the season.
But White has proved himself a survivor and the team he has subsequently built stands comparison with any in the post-isolation period. That’s what must irk him the most: here we are, three months away from the World Cup with a team that is the envy of the rugby playing world, and all we want to do is break it up. Now you know why the Wallabies are puzzled.