IT WASN’T A “FAILED” GAMBLE
Phew, the landscape around Springbok rugby must have changed even more than I thought over the past few years given the overblown angst that has followed a defeat in Perth that was completely understandable and also not wholly unpredictable.
I suppose it happens when the team becomes serial winners, as the Boks are now, but when I get
sent stuff by concerned Bok fans on social media running the theory that the Aussies, on the basis of a game against a much changed experimental team, have cracked the Bok code, then it crosses my mind that maybe I am inhabiting a different planet to many.
If requiring the Boks to travel around the world to play you with a team featuring 13 changes and at the end of a highly intense and emotional four test series against the All Blacks, which would have taken a lot out of not just the players that played in those games but also those that trained with them for 19 weeks, is cracking a code then yes maybe that’s the secret to beating the Boks.
To me it just doesn’t seem like much of a code if it is relying on the circumstances and context of last Sunday’s game in Perth. If the Boks play Australia in a World Cup quarterfinal in Perth next year, will it be after they’d scaled the emotional heights of winning an RGR series everyone agrees is tougher than a World Cup?
Will Rassie start such a game with his top forwards on the bench? And if he did, would he have waited as long as he did in Perth before ringing the changes? Or would he instead have done what many are now saying he should have done, which was send the big artillery on earlier. Which would have proved exactly what? Would those players that did start have not played a game for seven weeks.
Australia were seventh on the world rankings going into the game and the Boks were first, and by some distance. The Wallabies may be on the rise, and they did play well, but they are a team and nation now that you can experiment against, and when you experiment you don’t bale out at the first sign of trouble. If you don’t that experiment doesn’t give you what you are looking for, and if your mission is to give a hit out and opportunity then you aren’t doing that either if you take those players off early.
The Boks have so many meaningful trophies in their cabinet if you tally up the World Cup, the Lions series, the RGR series and three Rugby Championships that they can afford to relinquish the Mandela Plate just to create some space. No, the Boks won’t be happy to have lost the game, no champion side ever is. But given the obvious context, and this was written before the game so it is not a case of being wise after the event, it is definitely not something that requires an endless post-mortem and the wearing of sack-cloth and ashes by Bok fans.
REMEMBER THE LOFTUS GAME?
You don’t have to have a long or encyclopaedic memory to recall an occasion where Rassie’s brain and its working, the type of thinking that prevailed in Perth, were made abundantly transparent. It was the 11th of July, the venue was Loftus and the opponents were Scotland.
There was a stage of that game where the Boks were in serious danger of losing. The Scots, like Australia and Argentina also did this season, played out of their skins because they knew they were playing the world champions and had a lot to gain from winning. There was a lot of angst in the Loftus crowd and no doubt among those watching on television too.
The Boks had a bench that included Quan Horn, who has played most of his rugby at fullback. When Aphelele Fassi went off, and given the state of the game, it would have been expected that Horn would slot in at the position he knows best. But no, that was not what Rassie wanted to see. He wanted to see what Horn would do at flyhalf with Handre Pollard at centre and didn’t let the game situation stay in his way.
Everyone lauds Rassie for being bold, and we all praised him for his bravery afterwards. There was only really one difference between what Rassie did at Loftus and what he did in Perth - he won in Pretoria, so he was a hero. He lost in Perth, so there were questions asked, and talk of failed gambles.
The selection wasn’t a gamble, it was to serve a similar purpose to the one that drove the selection for the Pretoria game against Scotland. If Rassie had started with the forwards that pulverised the Wallabies so comprehensively late in the game the Boks would probably have wrapped up the game by halftime. But what purpose would that have served? It was No1 against No7, so a win would have been an expected result. Rassie threw in a curve ball, not to make it interesting, but to help him and the wider squad get something out of a game that to be fair probably shouldn’t have been played when it was, if it had to be played at all.
JUDGING PLAYERS WHO HAVEN’T PLAYED IN SEVEN WEEKS IS UNFAIR
So after what I have written I suppose readers will assume I buy into the theory that the bulk of the players who did not play in the RGR series did not make it and it means there is something wrong with the Bok depth. Nothing could be further from the truth, and to explain myself let’s get back into that time machine and go back not to Loftus, but the first test of the RGR series 60 kilometres away at Ellis Park. The All Blacks might have felt they’d cracked the Bok code after that game. Some of the New Zealand pundits certainly did. There was a lot of talk of Dave Rennie having the edge over Rassie. But there were many of us lot, meaning South Africans, who saw that opening defeat for what it was - a lesson that continuity in selection is necessary if you want cohesion. And it was cohesion that was lacking from that Bok performance.
Rassie knew that, and judging from some of the things he said in the buildup to that game, he knew it beforehand too. A lot of his talk that week was around it being a series his men were preparing for and not a one-off game. There was an intimation that they’d build into the series as it went along.
The All Blacks had had the benefit of tour games to prepare for the series, and their coach Rennie had also played pretty much the same team in all three of the home Nations Championship games in July. The reason the Boks lost in Johannesburg was because in the interests of building for the World Cup and also improving his depth for both short term and long term goals, Rassie rotated his selections after the opening Championship game against England. That England game was on 4 July. The next time that team played together was 22 August. That’s a gap of a month and 18 days. Small wonder they lost to a team that was coached by a man who, by the admission of the Kiwi media people I spoke to, was obsessed with winning the Bok series and wasn’t looking beyond that just yet.
So now, seeing we’ve done the time travel, let’s imagine that the team that played in Perth was like the one that played at Ellis Park on 22 August - they were starting a series. If that team, having had the benefit of starting a game together, was kept together for another game in Australia, my money says they’d be much better and probably win. The Bok side that started in Johannesburg got incrementally better in the weeks that followed, the Bok side that started in Perth might do the same.
It’s not a question of depth. It’s a question of there being too many players who had not played a game at any level for seven weeks or more. In most international competitions like the Six Nations new players coming in have at least played a club game in the not too distant past. That wasn’t the case for a lot of the players who played in Perth. So judging them just on that performance would be unfair.
SACHA WOULD BE THE COVER FOR WILLEMSE
Having made that previous point, and also noting that the player in question had a long injury layoff that he is coming back from, it would be stupid to argue that Fassi’s form is not a concern. But then we get into the debate about whether that team that played in Perth was really a dinkum second string Bok team, or more particularly - because obviously there’s nothing second string about Eben Etzebeth - that the combinations were second string.
I have written elsewhere that if a Bok B team was selected, Cameron Hanekom and not Marco van Staden, would wear the No8. Thomas du Toit would be the tighthead, very promising though the undeniably talented and still very young for a No3 Zachary Porthen undeniably is. Along the same lines, Gerhard Steenekamp would be the starting loosehead and if they were fit Ben-Jason Dixon or Ruan Venter might have been at No7.
And if Damian Willemse was injured and unable to wear the No15 jersey that belongs to him on current form? Then right now I wouldn’t choose Fassi, but would go for Cheslin Kolbe once he’s recovered from his broken jaw, and failing that my last line of defence would be Sacha. As good as he is as a flyhalf, and he does need to play there as much as possible so he can fulfil the promise of being the undisputed best in the world at the World Cup, so he can be brilliant as a fullback.
And Manie Libbok, who’d by the way be my Bok B team flyhalf now and not Handre Pollard, is one of the best attacking flyhalves in the world. There’s a lot of good that can be had from having both Libbok and Sacha on the field at the same time, as indeed we saw at stages of the RGR series when injuries forced them to both be on the field.
NEW WAVE OF YOUNGSTERS PROVED THEIR POINT
On the subject of Sacha and playing flyhalf or fullback, the minutes we saw from Yaqeen Ahmed as the replacement Stormers flyhalf in the Cape team’s opening Vodacom URC win over Connacht suggested there could one day be a debate over whether maybe Sacha should occasionally wear the No15 at URC level too.
Yes, I know that undermines and contradicts my argument that Sacha must play as much as he can at flyhalf, but we’re talking just the odd game here and there, and assuming of course that Damian Willemse is used where he is most often by the Stormers - at inside centre. Which in turn could be influenced by how quickly Markus Muller comes through, for there is talk of him being the Stormers No12 going forward, even though he is just a year out of school.
All of that cues something alluded to in this column last week. There’s a new wave of youngsters coming through that can use this URC as a platform to make what comes after next year’s World Cup, when surely many of what by then could be triple World Cup winners should retire, much less a perilous prospect for SA fans than might be feared.
Apart from the two Stormers players already mentioned, plus Riley Norton, who made his Stormers debut on the flank rather than his regular position of lock, the soon to be Bull Luan Giliomee is a very special player, Vusi Moyo has already played for the Boks and I agree with Sharks coach JP Pietersen that he played against the Ospreys like he’s been playing for the Sharks for 100 games and not just a few. And give Esethu Mnebelele time and he could well be the next Malcolm Marx that we are looking for.
At the Lions there is Batho Hlekani and Siba Mahashe, at the Bulls the name that immediately springs to mind is Cheswill Jooste and the not long away from his Junior Bok years JF van Heerden, who will hopefully start to get more game time now that Ruan Nortje is in Japan.
I can’t remember a time when the cup felt so full when it came to special young players coming through in South Africa, and there are several who didn’t even play last weekend.