As expected, Springbok coach Peter de Villiers has insisted on taking his strongest team on tour at the end of the season. The advice of various head and bone doctors has been ignored and the 39-man squad that will attend a two-day training camp includes the usual suspects.
There is time for much to change, however, for there are seven Western Province players and 11 from the Sharks in the squad — the two sides that will contest the Currie Cup final next weekend. If the physical intensity of the semifinal between the Sharks and Bulls is repeated, De Villiers can expect to lose several players to the injured list currently headed by John Smit and Jacque Fourie.
There are no overseas-based players in the squad, but it seems that the South African Rugby Union (Saru) has not ruled out using a few. The first and last games of the tour fall outside the international window sanctioned by the International Rugby Board.
However, Saru national team manager Andy Marinos has been in Europe recently talking to players. Frans Steyn, Ruan Pienaar, BJ Botha, Butch James and a few others may yet be part of De Villiers’s squad, even if they join it in the second week.
With the 2011 Rugby World Cup now just 11 months away, the only chance the top players will have to rest is during next year’s Tri-Nations. That’s assuming that Saru does not choose to withdraw them from the Super rugby competition that begins in February. New Zealand coach Graham Henry chose to do that in 2007 and his reward was to see the All Blacks eliminated in the quarterfinals of the World Cup.
It was Jake White who first mooted the idea of fielding a second team in the Tri-Nations ahead of the World Cup in 2007. To prepare the way he chose to rest certain key players from the end-of-year tour in 2006: Os du Randt, Percy Montgomery, Victor Matfield, Fourie du Preez and Bryan Habana.
As it turned out, Jacque Fourie injured himself just days before departure and Habana toured in his stead, while Schalk Burger, Bakkies Botha and Joe van Niekerk were unavailable through injury. White said at the time: ‘We’re now planning for the World Cup … The squad is a balance of experience and some players who have been rewarded for doing very well in the Currie Cup season.”
Hunted
When the current squad is whittled down to either 35 or 30, expect De Villiers to say something much the same. The difference is that De Villiers already feels more hunted than White was four years ago. His immediate future depends on results in Britain and Ireland, which was not the case when White flew out in 2006.
Ultimately though, White was forced to return before the end of tour to explain poor results to Saru. With the backing of president Oregan Hoskins, White survived and got his way in most things before being outrageously ousted in the aftermath of the World Cup triumph.
So the key question to be answered about the latest squad is: Can it become the first in 50 years to achieve the Grand Slam? If the answer is almost certainly no, then is it good enough to win three Tests out of four and then beat the Barbarians in Cardiff? Maybe.
The issue is the same that came to epitomise the team’s performance in the Tri-Nations this year. It is a squad filled with abundant talent and vast experience that somehow fails to achieve the sum of its parts. Partly that is due to the breakdown in trust between coach and players and partly it is due to the amount of significant rugby the senior players have been subjected to in the past 18 months.
Players who have won every major trophy in the game can no longer be persuaded that it is a matter of life and death every time they take the field, even when it happens to be for a Test match against New Zealand. Those players are hanging on to the belief, espoused by Fourie du Preez among others, that winning the World Cup means playing well for six weeks.
And so, whatever the look of the final touring squad, a dichotomy will travel with it. The coach needs to win and will put his faith in his long list of stars, but the players need to rest and the best results might arise by leaving out the very men the coach feels he needs most.
If there were to be a Test match tomorrow, the best team for the job might look like this (15-1): Patrick Lambie, Lwazi Mvovo, Juan de Jongh, Jean de Villiers, Bjorn Basson, Elton Jantjies, Francois Hougaard, Ryan Kankowski, Willem Alberts, Schalk Burger (captain), Alistair Hargreaves, Flip van der Merwe, Jannie du Plessis, Adriaan Strauss and Coenie Oosthuizen.
The bench would naturally be crowded with World Cup winners who could make their presence felt in the last half hour. Don’t expect it to happen any time soon, though.