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While declaring the Springboks ready to win this year’s Rugby World Cup, legendary former Bok scrum half Fourie du Preez also bemoaned South African rugby’s tendency to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
The thinking among many South Africans has been that this year’s World Cup, which will be held in Japan from September 20 to November 2, has come a little too soon for the Boks, thanks to the general carnage that has been the reading of their results since finishing third in the 2015 edition.
Du Preez has kept his rugby views to himself since retiring after said 2015 World Cup. But the Japanese embassy convinced him and Elton Jantjies to give a talk at the University of Pretoria this week on playing in Japan.
“Why would people have felt that way?” he asked a touch indignantly. “Ten [it’s actually 12] of the guys in the Bok team are from a team that almost won the World Cup. Shouldn’t they be good enough to win the World Cup four years later?
“Whenever we lose or have a close defeat – and I’ll use the example of the 2015 World Cup where we lost the semifinal against New Zealand, a game we should have won, by two points – we start at zero the following year.
“Why would we start at zero instead of a two-point loss and try to be 10% better so we can beat the All Blacks the following year – why start at zero again? For me, that’s clueless,” he said.
Du Preez said he was encouraged that Bok coach Rassie Erasmus seemed to have recognised the need to build on the foundations of the previous World Cup squad.
“I think Rassie went back to that team I was talking about, brought in one or two things and all of a sudden we look so much better. We are our own worst enemies. I don’t understand why we always have to start at zero. Next year we’ll probably be standing here again and starting at zero.”
Du Preez’s enthusiasm about the Boks’ World Cup chances was emboldened by the way his countrymen had played against the All Blacks juggernaut in their past three games, when only one point separated the two teams in their 2-1 lead held by Steve Hansen’s men. As a man who has won a rare seven of the 13 games he played against the All Blacks, Du Preez doesn’t buy into the idea that the men in black are “immortal”.
“If we were mentally better against New Zealand last year, we should have beaten them by 30 points, but, because in the past few years we’ve put the All Blacks on a pedestal, we didn’t believe we could beat them by 30 points.
“If you watch the game again, we were at least 30 points better. Yeah, we were lucky in Wellington, but at least we were in a position to do it and we closed it out. So why should we not be ready to win the World Cup this year?”
Officially, Du Preez’s favourites to win the World Cup are South Africa, New Zealand and England (not in any order). The first for the reasons already mentioned, the All Blacks for having set the standard over the past eight years and England because they have “the best coach at the World Cup” in Eddie Jones, his old mentor at Suntory Sungoliath in Japan.
Surprisingly, Du Preez made no mention of Wales, who are the Six Nations Grand Slam winners and are on a 14-game winning streak, or Ireland, who were installed as World Cup favourites just last year after convincingly beating the All Blacks in November.
Du Preez pointed to both not having won the World Cup before and Ireland’s tendency to capitulate at global tournaments, also questioning whether Joe Schmidt’s men were better than Scotland, saying the two sides were “50-50” to him.
The 2007 World Cup winner wouldn’t be drawn on which order he would play the Springbok scrum halves, other than to say that Faf de Klerk had done well against the All Blacks, Ivan van Zyl against England in November and Embrose Papier the same whenever he came on.
