It was a slightly surreal experience to attend the media conference following last week’s Currie Cup final in Durban. The domestic season had just drawn to a spectacular close and here was the Springbok coach attempting to fit square pegs into round holes again.
It is said that Peter de Villiers’s nickname among the players is Pete Helium. It refers to the fact that his normal speaking voice sounds like most ordinary people after inhaling a lungful of the gas.
But it might as easily refer to the lighter-than-air rugby ideas that emanate from the man.
Halfway through this year’s international season De Villiers decided that he could do without Frans Steyn and Ruan Pienaar, two players whom any other rugby-playing nation on Earth would canonise. On Saturday the pair scored a try each for the Sharks as they beat the Bulls to clinch the union’s first title of any sort since 1996.
Both made it into the 28-man Springbok squad that jets off to the United Kingdom on Friday, but all indications are that Steyn will be warming the bench while De Villiers’s opinion of Pienaar seems to have suddenly undergone some form of epiphany. Far from being regarded as a Jack-of-all-trades, master of none, Gypsie’s boy has now been installed as first-choice flyhalf and goal-kicker.
This, despite the fact that since returning from the Springbok squad in mid-season Pienaar has only played his preferred position of scrumhalf. Granted, his return coincided with an injury to Rory Kockott, so Sharks coach John Plumtree had Hobson’s choice, but it takes a certain kind of myopia of the brain to ignore Pienaar’s achievements in the number nine jersey since then.
But the peregrinations of Pienaar are nothing compared to the muddled thinking around two other selections. It needs to be stated clearly that Earl Rose is not good enough to be considered as a flyhalf in international rugby. Not now, not ever. It is inconceivable that De Villiers and his fellow selectors can have watched the second half of the Currie Cup season and missed that plain fact.
The usual excuse of quotas cannot be applied here. The squad of 28 includes 12 players of colour, all bar two of whom are there on merit.
The two exceptions are Rose and Chiliboy Ralepelle. The inclusion of the latter is an even greater indictment of the selection system.
Since being fast-tracked into the Springbok squad two years ago, injuries have dogged the 22-year-old Ralepelle. After a year out injured he returned to the Bulls squad just over a month ago. He has not played a full game or anything close to one in that time. Yet his presence in the touring squad was the catalyst for the greatest injustice of the lot.
John Smit is Ralepelle’s mentor. Both went to Pretoria Boys’ High and both represented their country with distinction at age group level.
Smit is now 30 and we are expected to believe that his hooking career is over. De Villiers intimated on Saturday that Bismarck du Plessis will be the first-choice hooker and that Smit’s position on tour will be tighthead prop.
There was a time some three seasons ago when Smit played all three front row positions for the Sharks in the Super 14. As usual the justification was that he had played loosehead prop until the age of 21, at which point Springbok coach Nick Mallett picked him as a hooker. The Sharks scrum disintegrated whenever Smit left the hooking position and he admitted that it did nothing for his own equilibrium to not know where he was expected to be in the front row at any given time.
If you add up all the game time that Smit has spent at tighthead during his career you won’t get to 80 minutes. Now he is expected to take on the best looseheads in Britain because De Villiers won’t admit that he needs one or both of CJ van der Linde and BJ Botha. And dredging up Smit’s past is as useless as suggesting that JP Pietersen can fit in at lock if required because he played there until he was 17.
The stated excuse for moving Smit to tighthead is that the team needs his captaincy. It is a fact that, following injuries to Smit, the Springboks imploded under the guidance of Victor Matfield both this year and last. But it all smacks of robbing Peter to pay Paul. If Smit is no longer the best player in his position then a post-season tour to the UK formulated purely for the acquisition of yet more money is the time to experiment. That, after all, is the excuse for picking Pienaar out of position.
It may sound bitter and twisted, but the selectors have had two months since the end of the Tri-Nations to formulate some coherent ideas for the future of whatever group collective we end up calling the team that currently bears a leaping antelope on its collective chest. For the next three years this team bears the mantle of World Champions: it deserves way better than it is getting at the moment.