The selection of Manie Libbok for only his second start of the international season as the Springbok flyhalf so soon after the over-emotional reaction to last week’s miss in Santiago would be a stroke of genius on Rassie Erasmus’ part were it not just so logical.
Cheslin Kolbe, Jaden Hendrikse and Manie Libbok were all spotted today in training taking shots at goal 🦵🎯 pic.twitter.com/xuCTQGSom2
— SuperSport Rugby (@SSRugby) September 24, 2024
The selection was a surprise because not many Bok coaches would have gone in that direction. Many of them would have swayed with the winds of public opinion and in their panic forgotten what their gut, because they are far closer to the subject than the man in the street, tells them to do.
There are some coaches who may have condemned themselves when they threw the baby out with the bathwater when crucial kicks were missed. Harry Viljoen is the most obvious example. When Butch James missed the kicks that cost the Boks victory over the All Backs in a wet weather game in Cape Town in 2001, he reacted to the outcry by recalling Braam van Straaten.
There have been few more reliable place kickers in Bok history than Van Straaten. But playing him at flyhalf meant the Boks had to deviate from the attacking path that Viljoen had started out on and revert to a far more conservative style of rugby.
There was immediate success when Van Straaten’s kicking drove the Boks to a morale-boosting win over the Wallabies the following week but it was to prove a pyrrhic victory as it was the start of the Boks travelling in the opposite direction to what Viljoen had intended when he started out against Argentina at the end of 2000 with the instruction to his players not to kick.
By the end of that season Viljoen and the Boks were so far away from his philosophy that, following a defeat to England at Twickenham where there were few redeeming elements to the stunted Bok game, it seemed inevitable that he’d fall on his own sword. Which just over a month later he did.
His successor Rudolf Straeuli arguably followed a similar path. The best game the Boks played in his first season in charge, 2002, was against Australia at Ellis Park. The out-and-out attacking player that was Brent Russell played flyhalf that day. Andre Pretorius was another pivot option with flair, Werner Greeff could play there too although normally a fullback, and of course there was also James. But Straeuli went ultimately with the safest goalkicking option of Louis Koen.
Koen did kick a touchline conversion to win a game against Argentina in Port Elizabeth in early 2003, but again it was a pyrrhic win. If you don’t have the right flyhalf option you have less chance of getting the scoreboard clicking over in the five-point increments that come from try scoring as opposed to the just three that come through penalty kicks.
NEED TO GET BACK ON THE HORSE
I spent Heritage Day driving so didn’t watch the team announcement press conference but it didn’t need the press conference for me to figure out Erasmus’ reasoning. If he left out Libbok now, and let this chapter of Libbok’s international career close off with that missed kick in Santiago, what chance would there be of Libbok ever being rehabilitated and returning?
You just have to look at why Libbok played so much international rugby last year and couple it with the current situation at flyhalf to understand why Erasmus needs Libbok to get back on the horse after his fall. He played last year because Handre Pollard was injured, which can happen again. His other flyhalf, the find of the season, Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, is currently injured, and he’s such a physical player that you can probably expect that to be the case fairly often in his career.
That’s why Erasmus needs at least three flyhalves, and with Siya Masuku not quite ready to come through at international level yet, if indeed he does at all, plus Jordan Hendrikse playing his domestic rugby at fullback, who is the third flyhalf if not Libbok? Actually if there’s a fourth it is probably Damian Willemse, but if he was a better place kicker than Libbok he’d be fulfilling that role at the Stormers.
So let’s imagine that Erasmus did leave Libbok out of his match-day 23 for this coming weekend’s return against Argentina in Nelspruit and then he got to Twickenham in mid-November for the England game with both Pollard and Feinberg-Mngomezulu crocked. How would it work out for Erasmus in that scenario if he had to back Libbok to wear the No 10 in such a crucial game?
He’d tell the media he had full confidence in the player and he’d try and tell the player that, but it would ring hollow and there’d be no demonstrable proof of that confidence if he’d dropped Libbok after what happened in Santiago.
SHOW OF CONFIDENCE THAT ALSO PROMOTES COMPETITION
What Erasmus has done with this selection is show that he does have confidence in Libbok, and the player will be boosted by that. Coaching is not just about strategy, it is also about man management, and there is a potential extra dimension to the Libbok selection that could further tip the hue of genius in Erasmus’ direction: What it says to Feinberg-Mngomezulu.
The Bok coach hasn’t kept secret his unhappiness at Feinberg-Mngomezulu for hiding his injury ahead of the Cape Town game against the All Blacks. The new young star is clearly a talent on the field, but he gives the impression he might also be a bit precocious, and very confident off it too.
Choosing Libbok as his starting flyhalf in a game where he said he would go full strength sends Feinberg-Mngomezulu a message. It says you have to compete for a starting place not just against Handre Pollard, but also against Manie.
Having three flyhalves competing for a starting place keeps all three on their toes, and that’s a big part of the culture that Erasmus has developed at the Boks. He does have Pollard there as a safety net should Libbok miss early kicks, and Pollard on the bench means he should be on the field should a clutch kick be required later on.
Not that we should assume Libbok will fail in any respect at the weekend. There was that one line kick he kicked too long, which to my mind might have been worse than his missed penalty, in Santiago, but if he showed any signs of rust in his allround game it would have been because he’s only played just over 60 minutes of international rugby since the World Cup - the first half against Portugal, where he was outstanding, and the time he spent on the field in Argentina.
Those who quibble over Libbok’s class as an attacking international flyhalf should remind themselves who was wearing the Bok No. 10 when they scored their record win over the All Blacks just before last year’s World Cup, and who was pulling the strings when they effectively started the RWC with a potential knock-out clash against Scotland. And who kept them in the game in the first half of the quarterfinal when France might have run away with it.
THE OTHER OPTIONS AREN’T FLAWLESS EITHER
Yes, Libbok missed that kick last week, but cast your mind back a few weeks to the Johannesburg game against the All Blacks. With three minutes left on the clock, the Boks were leading by just four when Feinberg-Mngomezulu was presented with a regulation penalty kick that would have made the lead seven and ruled out any prospect of defeat. He missed.
Had the All Blacks come back to score a try to win the game, that missed kick would have been blamed for the defeat and Rassie or the on-field captain at the time would have been pilloried for not insisting that Pollard, who was on the field, take the kick.
Talking of Pollard, he made some crucial mistakes in general play in the second test against Ireland in Durban that arguably cost the Boks the game, and in the first game in Pretoria, he missed kicks that could have shut Ireland out. So even the veteran is human, and the new kid on the block, Feinberg-Mngomezulu, is raw and still has flaws to his game, as we saw when he came on as a replacement in Cape Town.
Ideally, it would be preferable to have someone else in the team, such as Pollard in the midfield, entrusted with the frontline place-kicking duties, and the Boks would probably have won had that been the case last week. But if they lose at home to the Pumas and the flyhalf is to blame then the Boks are not nearly as good as we thought they were.