British & Irish Lions coach Warren Gatland should not have been entirely happy with the ease with which his team won their opening tour game but his concerns should not match the level of concern there should be among those South Africans who worry about the strength of local rugby.
Gatland should be concerned because, as he has already admitted, a lack of stiff opposition before the first Test could lead his team to be underprepared for the ferocity of the Springbok assault. Gatland was assistant coach the last time the Lions were here in 2009 and he agrees the Lions were caught out then because of the easy games they played in the build-up. The Boks effectively won that series in the first half of the opening Test in Durban.
The reason South Africans should be concerned about the eight try to two romp with which the Lions opened their tour has nothing to do with the Boks but everything to do with the long-term future of the sport as a business within SA — meaning the likelihood of local rugby being able to re-engage eyes, hearts and minds like it used to at provincial and regional level.
What the opening tour game reminded us of was the very different SA rugby landscape the tourists encounter now compared with their tours in a previous era. There was a time when the game against the Johannesburg team, then Transvaal, was a big game on the tour, usually a very competitive one, but they also had some tough games against the so-called platteland (country) teams.
That was the case even relatively recently in the 1997 tour. The tourists had to dig deep on a wet day in East London to beat Border. Border! Imagine what the Lions would do to the current Border team.
Second-string
Make no mistake, the SA administration doesn’t help the future of Lions tours by allowing the Springbok coaches to take all the top players out of the local teams. The 2017 Lions tour of New Zealand was interesting and absorbing even outside the Test series itself as Sam Warburton’s team played against mostly full-strength Kiwi franchises.
But if this tour continues like it has started, the tour games outside the Test series itself could become a yawn. SA fans aren’t stupid — the Sharks team that the Lions play on Wednesday will be close to a second-string combination. The Stormers will be without several Springboks too.
The local Lions though didn’t miss many international players and if they had Wandisile Simelane playing against the tourists the result would have been the same. That is where the concern comes in — SA’s rugby strength has been so diluted that the team representing the economic heartland of the country cannot be competitive against a touring team that was effectively playing together for the first time.
The dilution comes about through several reasons, but the chief one can be illustrated by selecting the following team reflecting overseas-contracted SA players: Willie le Roux, Cheslin Kolbe, Jesse Kriel, Damian de Allende, Raymond Rhule, Handré Pollard, Faf de Klerk, Jasper Wiese, Jean-Luc du Preez, Marco van Staden, Lood de Jager, Eben Etzebeth, Vincent Koch, Malcolm Marx and Coenie Oosthuizen.
Challenge strongly
To balance the loose trio I have slotted Marco van Staden in. He was playing for the Bulls until a few weeks ago but is now contracted to an overseas club. Two months ago it would have been Marcell Coetzee.
Those are just my first choices, there are many others — André Esterhuizen, Jan Serfontein, RG Snyman, Franco Mostert, Wilco Louw et al — who would challenge strongly. That is why Gatland and the Lions can’t be too smug about what they do to local opposition. What would that team do to the Johannesburg Lions? It would probably win as comfortably as the touring Lions did.
The above scenario is good for Rassie Erasmus and Jacques Nienaber if we just focus on the Boks. There are many reasons why players playing overseas is a good thing. Exposure to a properly professional environment, as illustrated by the improvements made by so many local players when they return from playing overseas, is one of them.
The strength of that Expatriate XV, and by replacing Le Roux with someone such as Tyrone Green or Dillyn Leyds, and that with a few other tweaks I can select an almost equally strong team that excludes the Japanese players and includes just northern-based players, is why the touring Lions are stepping into an even bigger unknown in the first Test of this series than they were in 2009.
But where does it leave the local game on the many Saturdays when the Boks are not playing? The provinces or franchises need turnstiles to click and eyes to be focused so the business can flourish. A lack of eyes means lack of potential sponsors. If the early part of this Lions tour highlights that problem and draws focus to it, it might not be a bad thing.
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