French fried

It is just as well for the Springboks that when it comes to 2009 history will be written by the victors.

France’s comprehensive demolition of the Boks in Toulouse added to a nagging, up to now easily suppressed, suspicion that these Springboks might not be as good as we think they are.

It is a thought that has tugged at my conscience as I have researched the results of a season that to all intents is one of the greatest in the annals of Springbok rugby.

Victory over the British and Irish Lions as well as convincingly taking the Tri-Nations is massively impressive but the devil lies in the details – uncomfortable facts rudely exposed by the strutting, crowing cockerels of France.

The record shows that the Lions series was won but it could so easily have gone the other way.

Not only did the British tourists outscore us in tries but luck played a huge role in the Boks getting to an unassailable 2-0 lead at Loftus.

The Lions missed, or were denied, what could have been crucial tries in the first test in Durban and the Boks got out of gaol in Pretoria.

Not only did they survive Schalk Burger being sin-binned in the 32nd second but they came back from 8-16 down at halftime and 8-19 after 60 minutes thanks to a try by Bryan Habana, which might have been blown up for crossing, a late score by Jaque Fourie, which could have been denied as easily as it was given, and a penalty by Morné Steyn (who did not come onto the field until the 60th minute) from his own half after full-time had elapsed.

Often in sport that’s how it works but in the euphoria of the series victory we tended to gloss over how shaky the Boks had been and how fortuitous the win.

In the third and final test the team’s management of De Villiers, Muir and Gold decided to make wholesale changes and, frankly, Springbok rugby’s next echelon was unceremoniously exposed – the 9-28 (three tries to nil) in fact flattering a disjointed home side.

The Tri-Nations went South Africa’s way but in all of the early tests the Boks were at times under the cosh until sudden ripostes, often against the run of play, got them home.

Not too much wrong with that because in sport, as Oom Boy Louw said, there is only one measure and that is what it says on the scoreboard when time is up.

The Springboks closed out the Tri-Nations in impressive fashion in Hamilton (in no small measure due to Frans Steyn’s pair of colossal penalties), and I cheered as hard as anyone, but in between there was another aberration – a heavy 21-6 thrashing by the Wallabies in Brisbane in which the Boks suffered the humiliation of being outscrummed by a nation never in its history feted for scrummaging.

Those two losses gnawed at me as I analysed the season and now there has been another against France – the 13-20 score hardly being representative of France’s domination; a team against whom the Boks have now lost five, and drawn one of their last seven internationals.

Staggeringly the Italians are now viewing the Boks’ creaky scrum with undisguised anticipation and the Irish, who have won their last two encounters against us in Dublin and who will include a number of Lions bent on revenge, must fancy their chances.

Add in the humiliation meted out by the Leicester Tigers and you see that the glittering trophies in SA Rugby’s cabinet might be blinding us to the true state of our game and that more defeats before the year is out may put a different complexion on the achievements of 2009 – and, I sincerely hope not, also signal the beginning of the end of a golden era.