BOKS OFTEN MISFIRE WHEN TAKING A STEP DOWN
“You’ve scrummed in the World Cup, but now you are scrumming in the Currie Cup!” Those were the words of the late Tommy Loubscher, the tough as teak and as strong as an ox late West Coast farmer when packing down in the first scrum of a Currie Cup game at Newlands in 1995.
It was of course the year the Springboks won the World Cup for the first time. That team was effectively a Transvaal team plus a smattering of Natalians (Andre Joubert, James Small and Mark Andrews, one Western Province player (Joel Stransky) and one Free Stater (Os du Randt). That was the starting team. On the bench were two Free Staters in Brendan Venter and Naka Drotske and another WP player (Garry Pagel).
But as Loubscher reminded his World Cup winning direct opponent in that game between WP and Transvaal, winning the World Cup and winning the Currie Cup are completely different things. After the heady triumph of basking in global glory, that Transvaal team bombed in the Currie Cup, even though they had so many World Cup winners playing for them, and it was Natal who won the domestic trophy by beating WP in the final.
So how did that happen? Well, there were a few things adrift at the time, among them the battle for control of the players that had enacted itself out between the establishment and a rebel group known as the World Rugby Corporation after the World Cup, and in which the Bok and Transvaal captain Francois Pienaar had been a central player.
It’s funny to think back on it now, because the modern South African player, with the 12 month season and the different competitions they have to play in, probably has bigger demands placed on him in terms of being on duty, but there was also a perception that the players were just fatigued.
There was a point when the Transvaal players went on strike, and I remember the top rugby writer of that era, Dan Retief, who was formerly of this parish, coming up with a quote when interviewed on television that I’ve never forgotten: “They don’t need criticism, they just need a break”.
It may not have been a physical break that was so needed, but a mental one, for winning the RWC for the first time in that epic tournament would have taken a lot mentally out of the players.
THERE’S A DISCERNIBLE PATTERN
Regardless of what the reasons were for that Transvaal team misfiring, there has been a discernible pattern since then. Several coaches have told me through the years, those that have had a lot of Springboks on their books, that often the input and commitment of those players when they returned to provincial duty would be determined by how well they’d done for the Boks.
The Sharks experience of 2009 is a great example to draw on. The Boks, with several Sharks players playing key roles, won a British and Irish Lions series that year as well as comfortably winning the Tri-Nations, during which they whitewashed New Zealand 3-0. But when those same players had to front a pretty ordinary Cheetahs team in a Kings Park Currie Cup semifinal they just weren’t at the races.
That observation is not meant to denigrate the players of that time. If there was a slip off in form, or motivation, it was probably sub-conscious and completely understandable. It must be hard to retain the same mental edge for a provincial or franchise game that you have when you are winning a World Cup, Lions series, Tri-Nations or Rugby Championship for your country.
SOMETIMES THE OPPOSITE IS TRUE
Those same coaches will tell you that the opposite was often true when the Boks returned from a tour of duty where they’d failed or fallen short of hitting their target. Then the disappointment would drive them to go all out in the provincial competition so that they could at least end the season with some silverware. That motivation might have driven the Sharks side that won the Currie Cup for the first time after a long wait in 2008, a year where the Boks struggled in Peter de Villiers’ first season as national coach.
Obviously though it depends on the extent or depth of the disappointment that the players may suffer. After their horrible experience of 2011, when they lost a World Cup quarterfinal to Australia in Wellington to the Bryce Lawrence refereeing freak show, the Bulls, Sharks and WP Boks would all have returned eager to make up for it by doing well in the Currie Cup.
The domestic competition playoffs were actually played just after that World Cup exit, and I was still in New Zealand when the Sharks, with all their Boks in tow, edged into the final while Western Province, with several Boks playing for them, missed out. So did the Bulls. The Sharks ended up going to Joburg to play the domestic decider and because the Lions coach John Mitchell had no international players of note to call on, the Sharks were clear favourites.
But that was not how the game turned out and Lions supporters will recall their team of no-name players (they were no-name at the time) thumping the star quality Sharks, who would clearly have still been suffering from the hangover from that jarring World Cup exit.
SERIAL WINNERS MAY FACE AN EXTRA CHALLENGE
It’s hard to equate the current era of Boks with any of the previous ones since South African rugby was unified in 1992. Yes, there were the big wins, such as the 1995 RWC and then the one in 2007, and Tri-Nations titles in 1998, 2004 and the aforementioned one in 2009, but for reasons associated with how South African rugby was run at the time, none of that success was ever sustained.
The current Boks have sustained their success, having just come off their first ever retention of the Rugby Championship title just two years after winning a second successive World Cup. But becoming serial winners, which the Boks are heading towards becoming, does not mean the pressure is released. Indeed, it might be intensified.
The players are only human and when I was watching Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu helping the Stormers to their win over Zebre in Parma the other night, it did cross my mind that if I was in his boots I wouldn’t want to be there. If I was any of the Boks’ boots, I wouldn’t want to be there. Not in October, in the small gap between the end of the Championship and the start of an end of year tour that features some seismic clashes against France and Ireland.
Obviously for players who feel they have to prove themselves it is different, but if you are established and in form you must feel you can only lose. Either through being injured or, as it looks likely to be the case for the unfortunate Jan-Hendrik Wessels, you get involved in an incident that ends up in you being suspended. He was only on standby, but the same thing happened to Makazole Mapimpi. Four of the Bok games on tour are counted among the five matches he is suspended for following his red card against Ulster.
Everyone who plays for the Boks right now must be desperate to be part of it and to be part of every moment, and yet it is right that the franchises demand their labour, for the franchises still pay the bulk of the players’ salaries.
WILL COMMON SENSE EVERY PREVAIL?
Those who read me often will know who I think is to blame here - administrators world wide who for whatever reason can’t agree on a global season and persist with coming up with schedules that intensify the club versus country conflict and are driven by an economic imperative that sometimes overrides common sense.
I was asked in a podcast from where I am now, Zinkwazi Lagoon Caravan Park, stuck away in the forest with vervet monkeys, if I would see common sense prevail in rugby in my lifetime. My response was that it depends how long I live. I suspect I’d have to live as long as the late Queen Elizabeth.
It really shouldn’t be so complicated for people to do what is right for the game. Locally it would help the franchises at least a little bit if this country would pay some heed to World Rugby’s regulation 9 and stick with the international window.
Playing an extra game against Wales may help the Boks with their prep for the next World Cup, but it doesn’t help the rugby ecosystem that the Boks will be playing in Cardiff on the same day as the Sharks are in Galway to play Connacht and the Stormers are playing Munster in Limerick. And all of that just one week before all the local teams start tough EPCR (European) campaigns.
THE FOLLY OF CONTRACTING TOO MANY BOKS
It was John Dobson speaking when I first heard the term. Ego contracting. The Stormers coach was talking about his franchise’s contracting policy, and he speaks with some experience when he suggests that having too many marquee players is counter-productive.
When the Stormers won the inaugural URC in 2022 he spoke about the value brought by what he called his “million-randers”. Meaning players who gave their all but weren’t on the top money that several former star Stormers players were on when they swopped Cape Town for Durban or Japan just before that.
The Stormers won their first international trophy at a time when they probably had the least number of marquee players on their books. And there may well be something in that, although for reasons I will explain, it is more challenging to have star international players now than it was up until 2019.
So let’s do a little exercise and call out the names of the star players who played for the Stormers before 2022, when they broke their international tournament duck. Let’s go back to 2005 - so we are talking about Schalk Burger, Jean de Villiers, Bryan Habana, Joe van Niekerk, Jaque Fourie, Eben Etzebeth, Bongi Mbonambi, Pieter-Steph du Toit, Andries Bekker, Duane Vermeulen, Siya Kolisi… There may be a lot more, my point being that all of those players had star quality. But how many top trophies did any of those players win with the Stormers? Hmmm…
So there were two names I deliberately left off that list. Steven Kitshoff and Frans Malhberbe. They stayed to be part of the Dobson culture and played a key leadership role in the initial Stormers success.
So when Dobson talks about ego contracting, we know what he is referring to. The current Sharks owners were initially courting WP/Stormers, but the WP bosses of the time couldn’t reach an agreement with them. So off they went to Durban and, to prove a point, they contracted several marquee players, among them some ex-Stormers, and thought that would buy success.
But you can’t buy success as modern rugby contracting is as much a science as it is in professional football. I’m not always completely sure the Stormers get it right for there have been times they give the impression they contract what they can afford and it irritates me when people try to use the safety net of long term planning. The Stormers are actually doing well and I understand the policy, but their supporters might not have the patience to wait until 2029 for silverware given that they saw their team win the first URC four years ago.
Of course, up until now they haven’t had the financial muscle of the Bulls and the Sharks. Jake White though may have got it right with his contracting, targeting top players who had something to prove rather than who had already arrived when he was in charge at the Bulls.
Some have used Marcell Coetzee as an example, but there have been additional good examples since then - Jan Serfontein is an international quality player in my view but is on the outer at the Boks, and now that Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu has arrived at international level, another Bulls recruit Handre Pollard has to prove himself too.
The other most recent Bulls recruit, Nicolaas Janse van Rensburg, who has been on the edge of Bok selection as an overseas based player for so long, is another. It’s a tragedy that the circumstances that conspired against him at the Bulls, whatever they were, mean that White won’t get to coach the team he built.
IT WAS EASIER IN SUPER RUGBY
So here’s why it is more challenging now. In the days of yore, meaning back when Transvaal provided the bulk of a World Cup winning team, it was easier to rely on a core of current Boks to bring you success. I keep using the Sharks as an example, but the Bulls from 2007 to the end of 2011 are probably the best example of Bok and franchise success being aligned.
The Bulls won three Super Rugby trophies at a time when they were built around star Boks such as Fourie du Preez, Victor Matfield, Habana, Morne Steyn, Danie Rossouw, Bakkies Botha etc etc.
But those were the days when there was no overlap between the franchise competitions and international rugby.
Those players signed off the year with the Bok tour in November, had December off and reported to work for the new season in the second week of January. They then had six weeks to build up to the new season and get aligned with the coaches plans. That can’t happen now as when the franchises are in their pre-season the Boks are playing in the Rugby Championship.
If Heyneke Meyer and Frans Ludeke were coaching that Bulls team now, it is questionable whether they’d have achieved the same success as it is just impossible to be serial winners over a 12 month season. In those days there were fewer trophies that needed to be played for too.
AN IMPOSSIBLE JOB
I did a piece, in this week’s Talking Point, where I ran an imaginary conversation outlining why the Sharks coaching job is a nigh impossible one. It wasn’t John Plumtree, the current under pressure Sharks coach, who contracted the marquee group he has under his command now. That happened a few seasons ago, when Sean Everitt was the coach. Not that he contracted them either. Far from it. Sean would choke on his cereal if I even hinted at such a thing as nothing could be further from the truth.
It was Everitt in fact, a day after being axed by the Sharks, who first told me he thought the Sharks coaching job was an impossible one. He said to me in conversation that he didn’t think it mattered who coached that franchise, it would always be a challenge beyond.
So let’s remind ourselves of Everitt’s stint at the Sharks. He graduated to being Sharks head coach as the replacement for Robert du Preez after achieving resounding success at age-group level at the Sharks. He had a plan that encompassed bringing the age-group players he had worked with through, and had initial success with it in the first few matches of the 2021 Super Rugby season.
The Sharks topped the log with a young team after six matches - and then Covid arrived. After Covid the new owners arrived, and Everitt, who had to leave contracting to a contracting department that everyone you speak to fingers as the Sharks’ problem yet the names mentioned somehow always keep their jobs, had the rug pulled out from under him.
Players who had intense loyalty to him and were so committed to the plan were suddenly fringe players when the marquee signings came in. The team culture Everitt had built was eroded. That wasn’t the fault of the incoming players, but it is natural for people who are displaced from their job to get their noses out of joint.
And it is also hard to build team culture when half or more of the team are in and out of the mix so often, and aren’t ever present in a pre-season. Dobson takes his Stormers squad every year to the Wilderness on the Garden Route for a training camp. Team building is a big part of that camp. If Plumtree took a squad away like that in this past off-season he’d have been working with a group not that much bigger than his extended family.
UNDERBERG IS NOT BERGVILLE, AND BERGVILLE IS NOT WINTERTON
So here I am on the KZN north coast, after a journey that started in Cape Town a few days before the Durban Springbok game against Argentina, then proceeded to Kruger National Park via a few days in Zululand and a transit through Eswatini. From Kruger the more conventional route was taken, through what used to be Ladysmith (there are a lot of pot-holes so I’m not sure if the British forces would have as much interest in defending it now as they did during the Anglo-Boer War), a night at Spionkop Lodge, opposite the mountain where the battle took place, and then onwards to the southern Drakensberg, meaning the area around Underberg, via Winterton before joining the N2.
Seeing Winterton reminded me of something. Whenever I mention Underberg there are people who want to remind me that is where Henry Honiball, the finest of Bok flyhalves post Naas in my view, came from. That perception is in fact wrong on several counts, the first being that Underberg is not Bergville. The two towns are probably about 200 kilometres apart, and that only if you have a helicopter that flies in a straight line or at the very least hugs the face of the Drakensberg range for the entire journey.
The second is that while back in the day the media, including myself, used to refer to Honiball as “the Bergville farmer” - it was lazy stuff like calling the old Western Transvaal team mielieboere or SWD the volstruis boere - I have subsequently interviewed Henry at his place of work. It was definitely Winterton, and not Bergville. Bergville is very close, but Henry told me farmed in Winterton, and not Bergville, when he played.
Either way, it was a long way from training in Durban. Both Winterton and Bergville are close to halfway between Durban and Johannesburg. And Honiball travelled that road every time he had to go to Natal practice.
Hugh Reece-Edwards, who is not far from where I am sitting now as he is currently resident, along with many of the Natal players of his era, in the Salt Rock area, used to also have a long taxing journey to get to training sessions both with Natal and with his club, Crusaders. He lived in Southbroom, deep on the KZN South Coast not far from the border with what was then Transkei.
Coming to think of it, the man I started this column quoting, Tommy Loubscher, also had to be a long distance driver to follow his rugby passion. He farmed near Veldrif, a few hours up the West Coast along the R27.
I suppose outlining these things is my way of making up to the players of that era for saying they didn’t have to train as much or be on duty as much as the modern player. They weren’t working on rugby morning and afternoon, and at Christmas time.
But they weren't getting paid (at least not officially) so they did have jobs to do and for some that meant making great sacrifices. They also weren’t protected by TMOs from fellow players with a vicious bent about them. Oh my, those boys were tough… And this column is long! Contact me for your medal if you got this far...
