IT WAS NEVER GOING TO BE FOREVER
In the buildup to last year’s first Castle Lager Rugby Championship test against Australia at Ellis Park, I asked Springbok attack guru Tony Brown a question - “Aren’t you one day going to be in a position where you may regret helping South Africa to discover there is another way to play?”
There’d been countless conversations with overseas coaches in the years since the Boks returned from isolation in 1992, many of them off the record, where it was stated that if the penny ever dropped here that there is another way to play other than the perceived traditional South African forward and defence orientated approach, the rest of the world would be in trouble.
And I knew that Brown subscribed to that theory because, although I hadn’t spoken to him directly about it, I knew his view from the Sharks coaches he’d played for in 2006 and who he remained close to. Brown, when he was with Japan, had often told them that he’d love to get his hands on the Boks because with their forwards a new dynamic to the attack would make them nigh invincible.
In Johannesburg last year Brown answered by saying it was his job to help make the Boks the best they can be and that his job was to help give them the best possible chance of winning another Rugby World Cup in Australia in 2027.
There was some talk when Bok head coach Rassie Erasmus was negotiating the extension of his contract to 2031 that Brown would join him. That was just before his good mate Jamie Joseph became a contender for the All Black job when Scott Robertson was unexpectedly sacked, so maybe although Joseph never got the job, it did open the former All Black flyhalf’s mind to returning home in the next World Cup window.
Brown was never going to stay with South Africa forever. He said as much in the same interview in Johannesburg, where he spoke of his desire to one day be coaching, or involved in coaching, the country of his birth. Hence the question. One day he is going to be in the opposition dugout plotting against a team that he has helped grow extra teeth and added considerably to its arsenal.
The rugby world has changed as the professional era has drawn on. When I wrote his book with him, ‘Mitch: The Real Story’, John Mitchell spoke about how, although he was prepared to work as Clive Woodward’s assistant at England early in his career, at the time he would have baulked at doing the same job for South Africa. “Mate, they are the old foe, it wouldn’t have sat comfortably."
But at the time he was talking his attitude had changed. He very nearly became a Bok assistant to Peter de Villiers in 2010. The former All Black coach was ready to sign up, it was something that happened behind the scenes that prevented him from joining up with “the old foe”.
Bok supporters need not fear that Brown will continue to give everything he has to the team in the remaining year and a bit that he will work for them. For he is the consummate professional and his position now is no different to the one Wilco Louw and Siya Kolisi were in when they played for the Bulls and Sharks respectively against the Stormers this season - in the sense that they may be future teammates, but right now they are the opposition and you do everything to beat them.
Brown’s impact on the Boks has been a profound one and will continue to be a profound one. And yes, when the time comes where he’s plotting against the Boks, he may have some inside knowledge about their psyche and, more particularly, that of Erasmus. But at the same time he will be up against an enemy that he had helped make a more complete article, helped galvanise into a much more formidable and less easily beatable force.
He knows that, but as he intimated in that interview/press conference 10 months ago, for now he will park it as his focus is on the Boks. By the time next year’s World Cup arrives, his job of helping transform the Boks will have been completed and he will have a new job - that of plotting against the beast he helped create. Good luck to him.
CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS?
So here we are just over one week away from the Springboks’ first engagement of the year against the Barbarians, and just over three from their first big test match of the international season against England, and it feels like we are looking at a different picture from the one we were seeing just over a week ago.
A Bok injury crisis? What crisis? RG Snyman is out for the rest of the year and so is Kwagga Smith. They will both be missed. But it has emerged that even Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, who was slated after he was injured in the Stormers’ Vodacom URC quarterfinal against Cardiff to be out for three to four months, will be back in the playing mix by the time the Greatest Rivalry Series against the All Blacks arrives.
Malcolm Marx? He did leave the field in a Japan club game with a bicep injury, but he’ll be up for selection for the Barbarians match. If I was the Sharks’ owner Marco Masotti I would be livid, for he is paying him a lot of money to play as little as he does for the Durban team, but we’re told that Eben Etzebeth is ready to go too.
Grant Williams is back, so while Cobus Reinach and Morne van den Bergh will be missing in the early part of the season, there’s no scrumhalf crisis. Faf de Klerk is in the squad, as are a clutch of really talented young halfbacks like Imad Khan and Haashim Pead.
Aphelele Fassi is also back to give Erasmus that option at fullback, where Damian Willemse has been excellent but can also play inside centre, as he did with telling effect before Fassi was injured in the record 43-10 win over the All Blacks in Wellington last year. Lood de Jager and Pieter-Steph du Toit didn’t play much for their Japanese clubs this past season, but they are ready to play now.
On top of that are the players who made such a big statement in the recent URC season that their standing in the Bok plans should have grown since they last played. I am thinking of Ntuthuko Mchunu here. His move to the Stormers has accelerated his growth and if anything happened to Ox there’d be no qualms about starting him in big games.
The Bulls scrumhalf Embrose Papier, like Mchunu a bit Bok up to now, also looks primed now to re-enter the mix with a bigger role in Rassie’s plans. In fact, he didn’t seem to be in the plans before. Now he is and it is because he is now fulfilling his undoubted potential.
THE LOW SCORING GAME WASN’T UGLY, IT WAS LOVELY
Call it Sod’s law. In the same week I wrote about how high scoring has become the way of modern rugby, and how defence coaches have become rugby’s equivalent of the fast bowler in the IPL, along comes a low scoring game where defences dominate that keeps you completely spellbound for 80 minutes.
Had the Stormers won against Leinster in their URC semifinal there’d doubtless have been some who’d have charged them with “winning ugly”, for it was Leinster who did most of the attacking. But a Stormers win would nonetheless have been richly deserved for they showed how important defence can still be and I have yet to come across anyone who didn’t thoroughly enjoy the game.
BULLS’ CHANCES DEPEND ON REINVENTION
It was amusing to see a slight change in tune from some Irish pundits after the Leinster/Stormers game. Suddenly it wasn’t the former Bok World Cup winning coach and Leinster defence coach Jacques Nienaber who was being fingered by the Irish media but finally an acknowledgment that when confronted by a good defensive system that boasts impressive line speed, the complex Leinster attacking game isn’t always that flush.
Of course, the game that precipitated the outcry against Nienaber was the Investec Champions Cup final defeat to Bordeaux-Begles in Bilbao. There were some quite bizarre incidents that led to tries against Leinster in that game that had nothing to do with Leinster’s defensive system, but perhaps more with the suffocating defensive effort produced by Bordeaux.
If you look at the statistics from that game you will note that Leinster did have a lot of the ball in the final and they also had a lot of territory. They had more than their fair share of 22 entries, but couldn’t convert. And confronted with the swarming Bordeaux defence of that game, they made the errors that led to some of the Bordeaux tries. It isn’t too much of a stretch to suggest that in addition to the flair and X-factor of the likes of Louis Bielle-Bierry, it was the Bordeaux defence, and Leinster’s inability to break it down, that retained Bordeaux their European title.
The Lions were unable to pick up on what Bordeaux did when a week later they played Leinster in their URC quarterfinal. Their defence was way too passive, and the net result was that Leinster put together their attack with ease and they ran up more than 50 points. The Stormers were different. They suffocated Leinster and their defensive line speed and massive hits had flyhalf Sam Prendergast dropping back deeper and deeper in taking the ball.
This cues the Bulls’ chances of winning next Friday’s final against the same Leinster opponents. The Bulls’ defence can be very passive and it’s why they’ve been involved in a lot of high scoring games. If they’ve employed the aggressive defensive system that the Stormers employed last week I can’t remember it.
It is asking a lot to reinvent in a week, but the Bulls’ chances of winning at the AVIVA may depend on it. They aren’t going to beat Leinster by trying to be Leinster and putting phases together. Another thing - Bulls coach Johan Ackermann got away with it against Glasgow, but while there is merit in playing Wilco Louw off the bench against most opponents, the big emphasis Leinster put on making quick starts makes it imperative that Louw is there from the start in the final. The Bulls won’t recover from a 21-3 deficit like they did in Edinburgh if it happens against Leinster.
IRISH CULTURE MAY JUST BE WRONG FOR JACQUES
Former Springbok coach Nick Mallett, speaking on the Talking Boks podcast this week, had an interesting and I would say correct take on why arguably the world’s best defence coach, Jacques Nienaber, isn’t being perceived in the same way in Dublin as he is in South Africa.
The Nienaber way depends a lot on big hits, on players in the team he coaches going out to smash their opponents. It demands a certain degree of enjoyment of the collision, of feeling yourself thump into your opponent. Nick, who of course apart from being South Africa’s coach at the turn of the millennium also coached Italy, reckons the physicality required is just alien to Irish players, who don’t execute with the same level of physicality as we saw from the Stormers last week and we see from the Boks.
TALK ABOUT A STORM IN A TEACUP
I went into the bush for two nights earlier in the week - Cape Nature’s Kogelberg Nature Reserve is certainly worth visiting if you haven’t been there - and was out of cell phone reception. As always, my first port of call when coming back to within range was to check up on what had happened while I was away. It turned out not a lot had - well it wouldn’t have if it were not for the propensity for the English sports community and media to take out a 12-bore shotgun and riddle their own feet with bullets.
The reference is to the hullabaloo around England cricket captain Ben Stokes and his teammate Gus Atkinson being out after midnight on the night after they’d completed a win over New Zealand in the first test at Lord’s.
Their celebratory drink at a London night spot hit the spotlight because a punch was thrown at Atkinson, but hit a security guard who was with the two players, by a Samoan under-20 player contracted to Saracens, but the real issue to the English administration and by extension the English media who wolfishly lapped it up, was that Stokes and Atkinson were out beyond the midnight curfew that Stoke himself, as a member of the leadership, had a role in imposing after some incidents that hit the news during the last Ashes tour.
It feels like I am misunderstanding something here. If a team curfew is necessary, surely it gets imposed when the players are on duty. Meaning in the buildup to a game and, in the case of test cricket where it is played over several days, during a game. But the incident that has seen Stokes and Atkinson suspended and looks likely to cost Stokes the captaincy didn’t happen during the game. It happened after it was over.
Indeed, according to the English media, although they only mentioned this in passing and probably should have noted it more than they did, Atkinson wasn’t even staying with the team in the team hotel that night. He lives in Chelsea and was staying at his home. The next test is next Wednesday, so the drink last Sunday night was a full 10 days before the England team next play.
I’m sorry but I just don’t get what the fuss is about. If Stokes stayed out after midnight when he was due to play the next morning, then the curfew applies and the fuss is appropriate. But for goodness sake players are not robots, to quote former Sharks rugby coach John Plumtree, and neither should we want them to be. It all strikes me as decidedly idiotic and I shall return to this subject from a rugby perspective in next week’s column, which will come to you from the road to Gqeberha.