Mental fatigue may be Boks’ most formidable opponent

“Right now they don’t need criticism, maybe they just need a break.”

The above quote was from my former colleague at supersport.com Dan Retief, who at the time of the 1995 World Cup was working for The Sunday Times and was interviewed on television during a stand-off between the Transvaal Springboks and their bosses.

It was a couple of weeks after those players had dug deep both mentally and physically to win the Webb Ellis trophy for South Africa, and it was during a period of uncertainty for rugby as a whole, with the South African players, as global champions, holding the sports future in their hands.

Rugby had been declared professional on the eve of the World Cup final, but it was too late to stop the machinations that had been started behind the scenes by a rebel organisation known as the World Rugby Corporation, who wanted to buy the top players and create their own competition.

My reason for mentioning this is because there may be similarities with what is tripping up the current Bok team in Australia.

Not only had the 1995 Boks gone through the huge emotional high, which followed weeks of sacrifice and high anxiety and months of tortuous training, of winning the World Cup, here was also a lot happening off the field.

Together those things caused massive strain and it was why the Transvaal team that was virtually the World Cup-winning team didn’t even make that season’s Currie Cup final. They were just mentally and physically drained.

There won't anything akin to the WRC working on the minds of the current Boks, but what is clear that they are a team that is a long way short of their World Cup 2019 form and are falling short in the very areas where they were strong in Japan two years ago.

CONCERN ABOUT SPECIFICS OF WHAT WENT WRONG

What should have been particularly worrying about the 30-17 defeat to the Wallabies in Brisbane wasn’t so much that the Boks lost, but how the defeat came about.

There were 19 missed tackles on a day where they completed just 69, and where was that physical dominance that would have been almost a given not just 24 months ago at the World Cup, but far more recently in the series against the British and Irish Lions?

The execution of core aspects of their game has also gone walkabout. To the extent that it was easy to understand what former Bok captains John Smit and Jean de Villiers were getting at when in the SuperSport studios after the game they speculated that, while it was impossible to put fingers on it from many thousands of kilometres away, something seemed off in the Bok camp.

They’ve been there and done it, so they know that when something like the Suncorp misfire happens there is probably something else at play other than just what we see on the field.

Handre Pollard denied afterwards that there was an attitude problem, and he was probably right to do so. The Boks didn’t play like a team that didn’t care and wasn't trying. Far from it. What was patently absent though was the energy that drives the super-hyped Bok physicality in big games. And that points the way to mental fatigue.

Just like the Boks of 1995 had played themselves to a standstill and expended all their mental and emotional energy in digging so deep to win the World Cup, so these Boks have gone through and are still going through a tough time facing down challenges that are unique to rugby.

WALLABIES AND ALL BLACKS DON'T FACE SAME CHALLENGES

Comparing what the Wallabies and the All Blacks face in this Rugby Championship to what the Boks and for that matter Argentina face is not comparing apples with apples. The Wallabies are at home, the All Blacks are just in Australia for a short period of time.

They haven’t had to deal with the two-week quarantine that the Boks and Argentina did, and they haven’t had to jump through the hoops both those teams had to jump through before the Championship just to ensure they got to play some rugby.

British and Irish Lions coach Warren Gatland was like a broken gramophone when he was in South Africa when it came to the subject of the sacrifices his players had to make for the series to happen. And he was right. There was no fun in that series, the isolation the two teams had to operate in was challenging.

But it was the same for the Boks, and while their lockdown was less acute when they first gathered for their pre-series training camp in June than it was during the actual series, it was nonetheless a time when protocols had to be observed.

And it was the same once the Lions left South Africa: the isolation in Port Elizabeth for the two weeks of the Argentina clashes wasn’t as radical as it was for the Lions series, but it was still isolation.

Before they headed to Australia for their two weeks of quarantine, the players had just two days at home. You can probably count the time most of the players have spent at home since they first went into camp in June on one hand. If even it is as much as that.

EVEN CHAMPION PLAYERS ARE HUMAN BEINGS

Yes, they are champion rugby players, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t human. If they aren’t feeling mentally and perhaps also emotionally fatigued after four months together and after having to dig so deep to beat the Lions it would put them a level above the normal human.

In the build-up to the 2019 World Cup the squad was together for a long time, from memory it was 19 weeks in total from the start of the build-up to the final itself.

But that was at least during what we now call “the old normal”. With the quarantine period over, the players have gone back to the sort of environment they would have experienced on tours before Covid, if you ignore the frequent testing and other protocols that is.

Yet it is still a tour, they are still living in hotel rooms, they are still in an environment that is totally focused on rugby and work.

And it might be contributing to the situation skipper Siya Kolisi unwittingly alluded to when he said that the players had been well prepped by the coaches on how to deal with the Aussie assault at the breakdowns but when it happened they just felt incapable of countering it.

And ditto coach Jacques Nienaber when he admitted his team was outplayed in every area but he was unable to put a finger on why.

Maybe it is because the reason goes beyond rugby strategy and is sourced in the unique challenges that this Bok team faces at a time that is so far beyond what we used to know as normal.

Even then playing Australia in Australia was considered a massive challenge, as reflected by the poor success rate of South African teams in that country in the professional era.