BOKS HAVE BEEN THE MAIN PROFITEERS FROM SIX NATIONS
When France slumped to their unexpected defeat to Scotland at Murrayfield, it confirmed that the Guinness Six Nations will end with none of the nations with real World Cup aspirations feeling happy.
Scotland and Italy have been the big improvers, but I don’t rate them as World Cup challengers. It was really France, England and Ireland who went in with World Cup pretensions.
My money says France will win ‘Le Crunch’ against England in Paris and win the Championship, but their loss to Scotland has to raise question marks about their ability to win the Webb Ellis trophy for the first time in Australia next year.
England went into the competition much like that nation’s cricketers went into the most recent Ashes series - in other words hyped and confident. Their coach was even looking ahead at this week’s final game as a potential Grand Slam decider.
Well, take that sports lovers, England are now playing this weekend to avoid the ignominy of finishing second last, and even then that would be beyond them if Italy beat Wales in an earlier game in the Super Saturday triple-header grand finale.
Ireland have recovered since their embarrassing opening performance against the French, and they played excellent rugby in thrashing England at Twickenham, but it will take a bit more from them than they have produced so far to convince me they will be in the same bracket as World Cup contenders in Australia next year as they were in France in 2023, where they exited in the quarterfinals.
In the meantime the Springboks have been watching from the sidelines. There was a chance a few weeks back their opening Nations Cup game in Johannesburg in July would be to determine the best team in the world, but not anymore.
Unless England miraculously assume an identity that is currently missing at Stade de France on Saturday night, they will be playing at Ellis Park to avoid a fifth straight defeat. And their coach Steve Borthwick will be staring down the barrel.
FRANCE FAILED THE TEMPERAMENT TEST - AGAIN!
France have the player depth and they are evolving their game more effectively than most other nations, so they do remain a big, if not the biggest, threat to the Boks’ hopes of making it a three-peat in Australia.
But the Murrayfield game for me proved a feeling I expressed as a guest in a podcast before the game - “It will be interesting to see how France react if they fall behind early like other teams have against Scotland in recent months”.
Sure enough Scotland did start off fast, and almost as predictably, France spat the dummy. Forget the late rally from the French for those tries came once the game was lost and the pressure was off both teams. Which kind of spoke to my misgiving about France - for all the gains they have made in the Fabien Galthie era, France remain France. Meaning they are temperamentally suspect.
Nick Mallett was a successful coach in French club rugby and also coached Italy and he will tell you about the two sides of the Latin temperament. It’s dangerous for opposition in the sense that if you let them in, they can take you apart.
Ask Mallett’s old adversary from 1999, the then All Black coach John Hart, who watched his World Cup dream unexpectedly torn up in a bizarre couple of minutes that moved France from a position of plight onto an inexorable path to victory in a World Cup final in London.
That was one of the craziest days I’ve experienced as a rugby writer. The day before that Mallett’s Boks were knocked out by that freak Stephen Larkham drop-goal in their semifinal.
I can remember at a dinner after the Bok game Stuart Barnes, then a lead television commentator and only recently retired from rugby himself, consoling me with the news that “Coetzee has just won”.
“What? Gerrie retired from boxing years ago? What are you talking about?”
“No, JM Coetzee, he’s just won the Booker Prize”.
It was true. It was the South African author’s second Booker, when he won for “Disgrace”, and it was something to feel proud about. This country has had some outstanding authors. But somehow it didn’t feel like the Kiwi journos, who were thinking that the Bok exit meant their team had already won the World Cup, gave a fig about that.
They did give a fig though when France ran riot, and some of my colleagues spent that game watching the experienced and wizened Kiwi rugby writer Wynne Gray getting more and more sombre while, sitting next to him and completely oblivious to his funereal expression, I excitedly told everyone within earshot “This is a great day for rugby!”
But that Latin temperament works the other way too and France have been equally prone to fall apart. Watching them capitulate to the Scots reminded me of a game I watched on television in my final school year (1984) that was played at the same venue and followed a similar script. I wasn’t writing about the game then obviously, but I do distinctly remember telling my mates “These guys are temperamentally weak”. Nothing has changed.
NOT EXACTLY THE SOUTHERN LIGHTS
France are much hyped ahead of every World Cup, but particularly when it comes to tournaments played in the southern hemisphere, it amounts to hubris.
Even when they played in the final against the All Blacks, a game they should frankly have won were it not for some questionable refereeing from the usually excellent South African Craig Joubert, it wasn’t really a great tournament for them - they lost to Tonga and were outplayed by the All Blacks in pool play.
France very rarely seem to travel to the southern hemisphere these days, at least not at full strength, and when they do it tends not to go well for them. Since 1996, meaning the start of professionalism, France have played 41 test matches spread across South Africa, New Zealand and Australia - and they’ve won just four of them.
Broken down by country the record reads: New Zealand played 18, one win and 17 losses; Australia 14 games, one win and 13 losses; and South Africa nine played, two wins, six losses and one draw.
Small wonder then that on the New Zealand television rugby magazine show, The Breakdown, there was a poll on who would win the next World Cup and France only attracted 5 per cent of the vote.
Obviously it being New Zealand the All Blacks were made favourites, but the Boks were pretty close, and no-one other than France featured.
RENNIE WILL CHALLENGE THE INSULARITY OF KIWI RUGBY
So last week I was so buzzed about the T20 Cricket World Cup that I didn’t dwell that long on Dave Rennie’s appointment as All Black coach and focused instead on what I thought was a flawed interview process. The very fact that it was felt necessary to put him through a stringent interview process being the point that was questioned.
But having watched Rennie being interviewed by Jeff Wilson on The Breakdown there were reminders there of his point of difference with his predecessor, Scott ‘Razor’ Robinson, that might be a bit sobering from a South African perspective.
Not for a moment do I believe that the recent waning of the All Black aura is down just to the identity of the coaches who have succeeded their last World Cup winning coach, Steve Hansen.
There was one single event just after the Boks won the 2019 World Cup in Japan that to my mind has undermined New Zealand rugby, perhaps irreparably - the arrival of Covid and South Africa’s subsequent expulsion from Super Rugby.
Playing just Australia and South Pacific team has made Kiwi rugby even more insular than it already was, and Rennie, when he took charge, made a good point when he said that New Zealanders need to wake up to the fact that rugby’s innovation is no longer the preserve of his country but is now happening in the north.
By north I assume he doesn’t just mean northern hemisphere, because South Africa is north of New Zealand (actually what country isn’t?), but he might as well lump this country into the northern hemisphere seeing the SA franchise teams play in the north and the overseas Boks play in the north (Japan is in the northern hemisphere too).
Razor did coach the Crusaders in the last years of SA’s participation in Super Rugby, but by the time he took up the All Black job he hadn’t coached against a SA side or indeed a northern hemisphere team for four years. In fact, Razor had never coached outside of the NZ structures before taking up the All Black job.
It may not be a coincidence that the two modern All Black World Cup winning coaches both coached other countries before taking up the main job in their homeland. Graham Henry coached Wales and the British and Irish Lions, and before his long apprenticeship as Henry’s senior assistant coach, Hansen coached Wales.
And that’s one of the main reasons Rennie should be an improvement on Robertson - apart from his time coaching Australia, the former NZ under-20 coach (he led them to three successive World Junior Championships) and Chiefs Super Rugby winning coach spent several seasons coaching Glasgow Warriors and has now spent a few years in Japan.
Of course the alternative All Black coach, Jamie Joseph, is also well travelled after coaching Japan, so he’d have boasted a more well rounded CV than Robertson (only ever coached Crusaders) too, but Rennie’s nine years out of New Zealand also give him the advantage of not being seen to be aligned to any Kiwi Super Rugby team.
There are so many wins for New Zealand in having Rennie as their coach, not the least of them what appears to have been an agreement in the negotiation process that he can select certain overseas based All Blacks like Brodie Retallick, but the biggest one is his experience of working outside of the insular New Zealand rugby environment.
RASSIE HAS SWEPT AWAY XENOPHOBIA
For someone who remembered the flak that one of the previous Bok coaches, Harry Viljoen, took for appointing foreigners to his management team, it was enjoyable listening to the various role players in Rassie’s coaching team address the media at SARU House in Plattekloof last week.
It was a real United Nations type experience, with defence coach Jerry Flannery’s Irish accent being juxtaposed with attack coach Tony Brown’s New Zealand accent. Then there was Felix Jones, an Irishman who has worked in England’s management, and the English conditioning chief Andy Edwards.
Rassie was a player when Viljoen was Bok coach back in 2001 and I can’t remember if he was one of those who objected to the inclusion of a few foreigners in the management team, most notably the Australians Tim Lane and Less Kiss.
Yes, you read that correctly, Kiss is now the Wallaby coach but spent almost the entire one year Harry spent as Bok coach as part of the management team.
I am not sure if it was the players who had a problem, but certainly some sections of the media, who clearly had their unhappy sources, were highly critical of the apparent “foreign invasion”.
But looking at Rassie’s management team it appears Harry was ahead of his time and the cross-pollination of ideas, as Gert Smal, who served as an assistant coach for Ireland as well as the Boks, would call it, can only be good for the Boks and is the way of the modern rugby world.
Take a look at the management teams of other countries - Pieter de Villiers, who played for France but is South African, was part of the Scotland management team that plotted the French defeat, Ireland coach Andy Farrell is English, so is the celebrated France defence coach Shaun Edwards, who presided over one of his most embarrassing 80 minutes last weekend.
In French and European club rugby every second club appears to have a Kiwi, Australian or South African in charge, not to mention the players from those countries that play for the clubs.
Now do you see why I describe New Zealand rugby as a bit insular? From memory Irishman Ronan O’Gara did spend some time with Robertson at Crusaders, but hiring foreigners in Super Rugby is definitely well short of being a trend. And it may be costing the All Blacks.
JAKE AND EDDIE FELT IT TOO
Jake White would probably be the first person to tell you that Viljoen was ahead of his time and let’s not forget that he was a Bok coach who experienced the SA rugby xenophobia of those days most keenly of all.
There was a lot of opposition to him bringing in Eddie Jones as one of his assistants for the 2007 World Cup, but the former Wallaby, England and current Japan head coach played a big part in that success.
Jones was childishly and spitefully refused the right to possess a Springbok blazer so Bryan Habana, who was clearly one of the players who recognised the value Jones brought, presented him with his.
SACHA’S MAIN RIVALS ARE HUMAN TOO
It was two days before Stormers coach John Dobson mounted a vigorous defence of his Springbok flyhalf Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu and at the same time almost apologised for pushing him into the franchise captaincy too soon, but watching Scotland beat France last Saturday did get me thinking about the Sacha question.
Sacha’s critics will say he tries too much, and that in doing so he makes himself prone to making mistakes that can be costly to his team. Well, who is Sacha’s main rival when you talk about the challenge to be the best rugby player in the world? Antoine Dupont.
Anyone see that ridiculous forward pass executed behind his tryline by Dupont that cost his team? Actually, he made a plethora of glaring mistakes. It happens even to the best when they are trying to create an opportunity for their team.
Talking of the best, who is the best international flyhalf currently? If it isn’t Sacha, I would argue it is Scotland’s Finn Russell. The British and Irish Lion has had an excellent Six Nations, but if you think he’s flawless think again - there were numerous passes last week, and against England for that matter, that fell behind players and could have led to a breakout try to the opposing team.
Maybe Sacha does need to weigh up the risk and reward dilemma in his search for optimum game management, but he’s got some excellent company when it comes to trying things that sometimes don’t come off.