Reluctant hero but Morne would captain Bok team of the half century

Everyone is doing it and until now I have resisted just because there are many things that make selecting a best ever Springbok team odious, the fact that like most other amateur selectors I am not well over 100 years old being one of them.

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The best you have seen is one thing, the best EVER is another entirely. Yes, the modern rugby players are bigger and more professional obviously than the rugby players of yesteryear. If you had use of a time machine and just transported Philip Nel, who captained the only Bok team to ever win a series in New Zealand back in 1937, into the present he wouldn’t cope against the modern players.

But allowance needs to be made for the era the players of previous generations were playing in and what the expectations were then. If a player was hugely influential in say the 1950s, who is to say he would not, with the benefit of modern training methods, been as influential today?

A good example of why we should be wary when asked to choose the best player in a certain position EVER is when you assess the scrumhalves. There is no denying that Joost van der Westhuizen and Fourie du Preez were the best Bok No 9s since the unification of South African rugby nearly 30 years ago.

When you are talking about influence and ability in his specific generation though it is hard to discount the claims of Danie Craven in an all time greatest Bok team. Did I see him play? Of course not. Did he have massive influence on South African rugby over a long period of time? Without a shadow of a doubt.

NAAS WOULD HAVE ADJUSTED AND EXCELLED NOW TOO

On the different requirements for different eras theme, there is a relatively recent example we can turn to. Few South African flyhalves of any generation have dominated games to the extent that Naas Botha did. You will hear those who remember him play lament that he didn’t tackle much and the recurrent joke in his era was that somehow he always managed to keep his shorts clean (I am not sure if that is entirely fair, but anyway).

The thing though about Naas in his era was that there was less of an expectation for flyhalves to tackle than there is now. Even relatively recently the wearers of the No 10 could be protected by a specific loose-forward, who’d free him from having to do the dirty work. Corne Krige did it for Louis Koen at the Stormers and the Boks two decades ago. Come to think of it, the Sharks are still doing it…as is any team that Quade Cooper plays in.

I remember having a chat with former Bok and Natal coach Ian McIntosh years ago and he made a point that I agreed with: Naas was ahead of his time when it came to the professionalism of his approach and he would have done the physical work that would have been required of him to be a better defender had he been playing now rather than between the 1970s and early 1990s.

The thing about Naas is that I did see him play, so he can make it into my personal finest Bok selection, though not into the Greatest Ever just because, and I am thankful for this just because I would be long dead now if it was the case, I never got to see Bennie Osler.

YOU ARE MORE EASILY INFLUENCED WHEN YOU YOUNG

When you sit and choose your own personal best ever team, what might strike you if you unemotionally analyse what you are doing is that you might go for players that played at the time when you were most easily influenced. Meaning when you were young. The reason I thought in my youth that Gerrie Coetzee was one of the greatest heavyweight boxers ever was because Norman Canale, a prominent boxing writer at the time, said so.

And if you look at my team selected from the past 50 years it will strike you that all the backs save for scrumhalf Fourie du Preez played in the time when I was at school or university. The Boks didn’t play much in those years (1980s), but had they done so they would have boasted enough size, power and pace (Danie Gerber, Ray Mordt, Johan Heunis), plus wizardry and playmaking ability (Michael du Plessis and Naas), to redefine how the Boks were seen.

Believe it or not I wasn’t a Western Province supporter (instead I could write a book about Natal’s best moments of their B Section years if anyone is interested), but there was something special about that Golden Era team that won five Currie Cups between 1982 and 1986.

People forget now that Michael du Plessis actually played a lot of his provincial rugby at flyhalf, but it was as a centre that he was ahead of his time, both defensively and in his ability to read a game. He played No 12 for the Boks. Had the Boks played more in those year, Du Plessis would have helped the legendary Gerber break many records.

Jaque Fourie was a brilliant centre and would certainly be in the best Bok team of the era that I have covered the game as a rugby writer (1991 to the present), and Pieter Muller was for different reasons a monster too, but Gerber would vie with Fourie du Preez in my view to be the best South African player of the last 50 years.

That answers the question of why Du Preez makes the side and not Joost. Joost was a bit like Beauden Barrett: Probably the best rugby player in the teams he played in and one of the best rugby players of his era but not always necessarily the most ideal player in his position. He had technical weaknesses we cannot overlook. Du Preez had none, and the thought of him operating in tandem with Naas behind the pack that I have chosen is enough to frighten the wits out of any mythical opponent.

NO WORLD CUP WINNING CAPTAINS MAKE THE TEAM AS PLAYERS

You will notice that none of the World Cup winning captains make the team. Francois Pienaar, John Smit and Siya Kolisi were/are all brilliant leaders, but they wouldn’t make the best team as players. Pienaar was an outstanding leader, and should have gone into politics after his playing career ended, but neither he nor Siya are better rugby players than Schalk Burger.

The 2004 Rugby World Player of the Year wasn’t the out and out fetcher most wearers of the No 6 are but then what South African opensiders who lasted the pace and had long careers were? Heinrich Brussow was probably the best of them but he never played for the Boks for long enough.

That age bias thing might come in here but Morne du Plessis was the Bok captain when I first started following rugby closely in the mid-1970s and he was hugely influential at the time. He retired relatively young (he was 31 when he called it quits at the end of 1980) but still had an international career that spanned nearly 10 years.

When it comes to statesmanship, a rare thing in politics these days unfortunately, Morne would be your man. A mark of this was how highly respected he was by the All Black team, led by Andy Leslie, that lost a particularly rancorous and controversial series here in 1976. I’m told he was also highly regarded for his sportsmanship by the Lions team that toured in 1980 too.

Indeed, if he and Edward Griffiths, who drove the public relations successes of the 1995 World Cup, when Morne was manager, got to work with Donald Trump I am sure the pair of them could do the impossible by making the American president popular with the media. Were it not that he seems to be a reluctant hero, Du Plessis would probably have put his good leadership to use as a rugby president when his playing career was over.

Du Plessis was a genuine No 8, unlike two of the players who played in that position in three of the Bok World Cup winning sides. Mark Andrews played there in 1995 and was really a lock, Danie Rossouw, normally a flank or lock, was at the back of the scrum when Jake White’s team won in 2007. Duane Vermeulen, less of a classical No 8 than Du Plessis, played in the most recent World Cup and he’d be my second choice, with Gary Teichmann third and Nick Mallett fourth.

Mallett only played two tests for South Africa but my memories of him as a player were good ones and it could possibly be argued that he would have played more for South Africa had a) South Africa not been isolated from international rugby at that time, the early to mid-1980s, and b) he’d elected to study at Stellenbosch rather than UCT.

LOTS OF CLOSE CALLS

The nearest challengers for Botha at pivot would be Henry Honiball, for Heunis at fullback it would be Andre Joubert, who’d in turn be a short head ahead of Gysie Pienaar, who’d have been the starting No 15 were it not for his troubles dealing with the high ball in New Zealand in 1981.

Divan Serfontein, who scored the winning try in the first test against the British Lions in Cape Town in 1980, was the next best to Du Preez/Joost, though I do have good memories of the late Paul Bayvel against the All Blacks in 1976, while Gerrie Germishuys, Chester Williams and Bryan Habana would challenge Carel du Plessis on the left wing. But not for nothing was Carel known as the Prince of Wings. He never made it as a coach, but what a great rugby player.

Frik du Preez was just a bit before my time and the period the team is selected from, and I know just enough about those first six years of the 1970s, the ones where I was still in single digits when it comes to age, to know there wasn’t too much material to select from. In that period the Boks did win a home series against the All Blacks (1970), remembered for the tackling of Joggie Jansen, but they were well beaten by England at Ellis Park in 1972 and of course the Lions in 1974.

SITTING ON THE FENCE OVER SECOND ROW

The impossible selection is at lock. There were three post-isolation Bok locks who were the best in their world in their position and roles at times in their career and I am not going to select a team that leaves out any one of Bakkies Botha, Mark Andrews or Victor Matfield. So let’s rotate them according to the opposition.

I will select my best post-isolation team, the era of Bok rugby I have covered, next week and hopefully by then I might have made up my mind on my starting second row. Right now I can’t. Another toss-up is for hooker, where there is nothing separating Bismarck du Plessis and Malcolm Marx, and possibly even Uli Schmidt in his pomp.

It is also nigh impossible to choose between Juan Smith and Pieter-Steph du Toit. Indeed, there was an abundance of riches at blindside flank in this half century, with Theuns Stofberg and Gert Smal also worthy of consideration for the No 7 jersey.

There aren’t any current Boks in the side - Malcolm Marx was in but I just crossed him out on the basis that I can get away with it if I argue that we should wait until his career is over before deciding, and the same goes for others who in a few years may well belong in the team listed below.

BOK TEAM SELECTED FROM THE YEARS 1970 TO 2020: Johan Heunis, Ray Mordt, Danie Gerber, Michael du Plessis, Carel du Plessis, Naas Botha, Fourie du Preez, Morne du Plessis (captain), Juan Smith, Schalk Burger, Mark Andrews/Victor Matfield, Bakkies Botha, Hempies du Toit, Bismarck du Plessis, Os du Randt.