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This year was one of those when the chickens came home to roost for South African rugby. Simnikiwe Xabanisa picks five things that 2016 hopefully taught the sport.
Talent alone isn’t enough
There was a time South African rugby could afford losing a Clyde Rathbone to Australia because they had a Jaque Fourie lying in wait. There was a time when SA rugby produced 110kg flankers who ran like the wind and possessed the meanness of a rattlesnake. Somewhere along the line the powers-that-be started believing it would last forever. Until the world became a global village and overseas teams started recruiting players before they were even men. Well, that and the fact that the natural size, power and explosiveness of the SA player was expected to overcome skill in perpetuity. Thanks to the ineptitude showed by the Springboks this year, never will proper coaching – conditioning, skills, game management, etc. – be overlooked again just because there’s a long queue of boys wanting to be Boks.
Money isn’t everything
Hell, by the looks of it, money can’t even buy Johan Goosen love in Paris. French rugby (Racing Metro) nursed Goosen back from an injury prone youngster into a semblance of a rugby player who could get back into the Bok team. But the moment he got comfortable he started whining about playing behind Dan Carter, how cold the Parisian winters were and dropping broad hints about wanting to compete for the Bok flyhalf jersey with the Cheetahs. Nobody begrudges players the ability to make as much money as they can from a game that probably exploits them anyway. But all that these new super deals have done for SA rugby is give us soulless players who take and give nothing back to the game by sleepwalking their way through most matches.
Sponsors don’t do it for the love of the game
Absa’s failure to renew their sponsorship has proved beyond doubt that in these cash-strapped days sponsors will no longer do it for emotional reasons. A Bok team which still struggles to be inclusive and is underperforming simply isn’t an attractive way to leverage one’s brand, and how many companies would entrust their millions to a company whose chief executive is facing financial mismanagement charges?
Hard decisions usually are the right ones
Yet, there has been a refusal to make any at SA Rugby this year. The appointment of Bok coach Allister Coetzee and his assistants has been discussed to death. But it is other things that need to be discussed like no real decision on overseas-based players, strange qualifying competition for the Currie Cup this year, scheduling Currie Cup games to clash with the Super Rugby final or an All Black test match, how long it’s taking to replace the SA Under-20 coach, and how long it took to replace Rassie Erasmus and who they chose to replace him. The flurry of big-ish calls recently made about SA Rugby’s structures has masked the fact that indecision has gripped the decision makers in the organisation this year.
The Kings need to be scrapped or treated like the special case they were intended to be
When the concept of the Kings was first floated in its Southern Spears guise, the idea was to make sure that a great rugby area had a decent rugby team and hopefully a vehicle to spark meaningful transformation. But here we are in 2016 and the Kings are no more than an unwanted charity case which drains money because it’s supposed to be a good cause. And needless to say, it has achieved none of its performance or transformation objectives. That’s why a decision needs to be made to either call time on the project or to unabashedly treat it like the special case it was supposed to be. That would entail putting it in the right hands, getting a coach that’s going places and aggressively guarding against losing young black talent meant for the Kings to vultures like the Sharks and Bulls. The Kings project is still a good idea for SA rugby, but in its current form it’s a waste of time and money.
