It never rains, but it pours. In addition to being humiliated in Sydney by Australia last week, the Springbok B team is on the way to becoming a C team for this week’s test against New Zealand. Players are dropping like flies and, while it’s hard to know where to lay the blame for some things, it’s patently obvious for others.
If you were to use one case study to illustrate the malaise, the curious story of Johan Muller would be the right choice. Muller, a World Cup winner under Jake White in 2007, left these shores at the end of 2009 to take up employment with Munster in Ireland. He expected to wind down slowly to retirement, but this year he received a phone call from Springbok coach Peter de Villiers, asking if he might be available again for the Springboks.
Muller dropped everything and high-tailed it over to join the extended training squad put together by De Villiers. What no one can really say is if he was injured when he got on the plane, or if he genuinely picked up a mild hamstring strain during the opening days of the training camp.
Muller was unable to take part in the group sessions and had to pass an extremely late fitness test to board the plane to Sydney last week. On the Tuesday evening he was included in the starting line up to face the Wallabies, but by the time match day rolled around he had been replaced by Alistair Hargreaves.
The hamstring strain, it turned out, was not responding to treatment rapidly enough, so Muller dropped out and a few days later it was announced that he would be replaced in the squad by the uncapped Gerhard Mostert. Muller left for home on the day Mostert arrived, having clocked up many thousands of air miles without ever coming close to playing a Test match.
With Bakkies Botha and Victor Matfield at home in Pretoria, presumably wrapped in cotton wool, there is now officially a lock crisis in this country.
Andries Bekker will take no part in the World Cup after undergoing ankle surgery last week. Flip van der Merwe popped a rib against the Wallabies and has returned home, and Hargreaves is touch and go after the bruising encounter in Sydney.
So, assuming nothing else goes wrong before Saturday, the Springbok lock pairing in Wellington could be Mostert and Danie Rossouw, and you’d have won a pile of cash from the bookies if you’d predicted that before the end of the Super 15.
One thing that the sometimes troubled reign of De Villiers has done is to give the lie to the idea that 15 people become supermen when they take to the field in green-and-gold jerseys. There is no such thing as a poor Springbok team, goes the old saw, but that was unmistakeably what we saw in Sydney.
In any other scenario the arrival of Mostert would be seen as a major anomaly. The 26-year-old Mostert fits the description of a Springbok lock — he’s big, heavy and aggressive — but he has done nothing in his career to suggest he is capable of playing at a higher level. He has played for the Leopards, Lions and Sharks, where he spent most of his time on the physio’s bench, and when the chance came to move abroad, he signed up with Stade Franais.
Clearly he has a good agent and clearly the agent has a hotline to the Springbok coach. By contrast, a loyal campaigner like Keegan Daniel has been given the rough end of the pineapple. The new captain of the Sharks has been in outstanding form for the past two seasons and even played a Test match in Ireland late last year, but he has been completely overlooked ever since.
Daniel’s ability to play anywhere in the back row is a blessing to any coach, but specifically he must wonder what he has to do to be regarded as superior to last week’s Springbok openside flank, Deon Stegmann. The Bulls man looked sadly out of his depth, as he has done in each of his previous international appearances.
The Springbok brains trust has decided that the physical attributes of Gerhard Mostert are of international class, despite the fact that he has played a mere handful of games in the past 12 months, in none of which has he dominated proceedings.
Daniel, who does it week in and week out, is the wrong shape and therefore overlooked.
None of the foregoing will be relevant if, six weeks from now, the Springboks are able to take their strongest squad to the World Cup. No one is suggesting that Stegmann, Mostert and Daniel are better players than Schalk Burger, Victor Matfield, Bakkies Botha and the rest. But it would be nice to think that in a crisis the management team had something a little more robust in the way of forward planning to fall back on.