LET’s skip all the emotional claptrap, the political correctness and newfound South African way of justifying that our teams don’t lose, the other teams just score more points. Let’s get real and call Saturday’s Springbok Test defeat and the five-match tour of Europe exactly what it was: an absolute disaster and a disgrace.
I love John Robbie on talkback radio. He is the best because he calls it like it is, but when John is explaining losses to France and Ireland as nothing more than fatigue I get worried about those ultra-positive contracts one has to sign to be allowed on to SuperSport.
The Boks lost to a half-decent French team, a Leicester team missing 12 of their regulars, a Saracens SA XV that would not end in the top six of the Currie Cup, made Italy look like Six Nations contenders and should have been put away by 20 points by Ireland, who in the last year have been the most consistent international team. That the Boks were named international team of the year after taking a beating from the Irish was as close as it comes to an Irish joke, and it wasn’t a particularly funny one.
Australia losing to Scotland gave some perspective to the Tri-Nations campaign. New Zealand’s changing of coaching roles and reversal to a more conservative approach, orchestrated by the world’s best flyhalf, Dan Carter, who incidentally did not play in the two defeats against the Boks in SA, adds more reality to the quality of the Tri-Nations win, and the All Blacks’ fitness in Marseilles ended any arguments that the Boks lost because they were simply too tired. The All Blacks, in club and provincial games, played as much rugby as the Boks and the Test sides have played even more matches this year than the Springboks.
The Boks lost because a French team physically roughed them up and exposed the fragile Bok front row with John Smit as a tighthead. The Bok scrum only resembled a quality unit when BJ Botha was at tighthead against Ireland and Smit was at hooker. The moment Smit moved to tighthead, the only area of dominance that belonged to the Boks disappeared.
The line-out, the strength of the Boks since the 2007 World Cup, was a shambles and the fact that the man who coached the line-out between 2004 and 2007 was not even mentioned in the post-match television analysis was as diabolical as the justification for the defeats.
Gert Smal’s true value to the Boks was illustrated in Dublin on Saturday. The Bok line-out did not struggle because Smit’s line-out throwing was poor. Smit is the best line-out thrower in world rugby.
The Bok line-out was reduced to rubble because the new coaching staff have not changed anything since 2007. The calls are still the same and this was a case of the master (Smal, now with Ireland) upstaging the student (Victor Matfield). I have never seen a Test where Matfield has been so innocuous and lacked such presence.
Smal, more than anything else, beat the Boks and it showed how little this team has actually advanced.
The senior players have run the team since Peter de Villiers took over, but there comes a point when a team needs a coach who coaches, and not a coach that takes them to the ground in the comfort also known as a team bus.
Should De Villiers get fired? No. But he needs help and the most qualified person to help him, in the role of national director of coaching, is the man who masterminded SA’s 2007 World Cup win. Jake White is the sound-board that could turn De Villiers into a coach and not the players’ mate who allows them to do as they please.
The fatigued South African s are hanging around for a match against the All Blacks. Could someone at the South African Rugby Union explain that one to me? No, because there isn’t anyone there with the rugby acumen to give me that answer.
Think of this tour and the chaos and lies. Let’s start with the lie about transformation. Black players selected in the squad were sent home and white players not in the original squad ended up playing in the Tests when De Villiers hit the first of many panic buttons.
De Villiers said Smit’s future was at tighthead, so why did he draft in BJ Botha? Why was Maku not put on the bench against Italy instead of Adriaan Strauss , who was not even in the original tour?
Window-dressing at its most crass. The same applies to the selection of Raubenheimer and Johnson when Jean Deysel also went straight from the beach to the Test squad. I believe the selections of Deysel and Strauss should have been made originally, but the squad chosen was a transformation con that insulted any decent black rugby player in this country.
If Smit is going to the World Cup at tighthead then they had to persist with him through all the struggles.
If Morne Steyn is going to kick SA that World Cup-winning penalty then you play him through the shocker he had in Dublin and write it off to an experience that will make him stronger. When De Jong is the find of the midweek side and Adi Jacobs gets injured, you don’t draft a 50-Test cap Springbok based in Munster into the Test squad and get him to sit on the bench for 63 minutes.
You either start with Jean de Villiers, who is the best inside centre in the game, or you say to the newcomer De Jongh, this is your chance to take that step up. If SA had lost with the next generation of players there would be no issue, but to have got beaten so convincingly with the best team available, outside of Bakkies Botha and Frans Steyn, then the Bok selectors need to ask themselves why they haven’t resigned.
The tour objective was to develop players and win. Neither objective was achieved. More careers were broken than made and the denial within the team simply intensified.
The rugby the Boks played was poor. The substitutions were not tactical, they were terrible, and they have been all year. The All Blacks played stupid rugby against SA in SA and paid the price. The Boks fed off their mistakes and never had to play risk rugby.
In Hamilton, the Boks were a cross-kick from defeat, in Pretoria they were saved by a last-minute 55m penalty, and in Johannesburg they were pulverised by the British and Irish Lions. In Toulouse, Leicester, Wembley and Croke Park they looked like world chumps and not world champs.
Whoever let Smal go should be fired, yet that won’t happen because no one will remember him ever asking to make a further contribution to the Springboks. There is no explanation why a guy who won SA the World Cup won’t be used to improve the chances of them retaining the Cup.
Excellence is punished; mediocrity gets the equivalent of a knighthood.
This tour did not ask questions, it provided every answer and someone at South African rugby has to have the balls to bring together the best rugby brains, facilitate the uber egos and clean the wound instead of adding an Elastoplast by claiming the Boks are the International Rugby Board team of the year.
Now is the time for honesty because the best team in the world does not get smashed in Brisbane, Leicester, Wembley, Toulouse, Dublin, Johannesburg and sneak two three-point wins in Pretoria and Hamilton.
The Boks are not as tired as we think and they are not as good as we think. But they could be the best if every agenda was put to one side and decisions were made that benefit the Boks and confront issues instead of blaming referees, fatigue and glorifying five-point losses.
n Keohane, the SAB Sports and Internet Columnist of the Year, is the chief operating officer for Highbury Safika Media.