We must BE the champions

As another international rugby season gets underway here’s hoping we’ll be better at being world champions than the last time we held the Webb Ellis Cup.

I say this because of my ongoing involvement with a project researching and writing scripts for a television series to bring the Springbok Saga – from one World Cup victory to the next – up to date and being reminded how quickly we allowed the golden glow of June 24, 1995 to dim.

By March of 1996 Kitch Christie had stood down as coach; by July the Springboks had lost tests to Australia and New Zealand; by August Francois Pienaar, the first man to hold up rugby’s ultimate trophy in victory, had been pushed out and by the end of that month the man who kicked the winning dropped goal, Joel Stransky, had also been discarded.

Team manager Morné du Plessis and media officer Edward Griffiths would also be forced out; thus discarding a management composition that had worked extremely well on the march to World Cup glory in 1995 – a structure which, interestingly, was never again been duplicated.

And the implosion did not end with individuals. The Springboks conceded the first ever home series victory to the All Blacks and by the following year, 1997, the coaching merry-go-round and errors which would become such a theme of the ensuing seasons, including the Jake White years, were in full swing.

The record shows that South Africa did not make a very good job of being the world champions with the impact of a variety of issues, not only rugby ones, causing such controversy and forcing the standard so low that it really is a miracle that the Springboks won the World Cup for a second time in France – 12 years and four months after the first.

Going through it all I was astounded. Coaching aberrations, the “Geogate” and “Kamp Staaldraad” debacles, presidential egos and ambitions, despicable man management, parliamentary intrusions, 53-3 at Twickenham, 52-16 at Loftus and 49-0 in Brisbane, poor discipline and numerous odd selections and still we did it – we won another World Cup.

It is by now common cause that Jake White had no intention of continuing so there obviously had to be a new coach. The job fell to Peter de Villiers and with his arrival the entire coaching and management structure changed.

Change is not necessarily bad, especially as there is some continuity with the retention of captain John Smit and senior figures such as Victor Matfield and Percy Montgomery, but it has to be hoped that whatever modifications are instituted are aimed at improving the 2007 World Cup template rather than doggedly imposing a new will and personality on the team as happened so often in the 13 post-isolation years.

The Springbok team belongs to the people and should not be tinkered with, but already De Villiers, whose tendency towards contradiction has quickly been seized upon, has taken a big risk by opening the test season with a team that contains some experimentation.

To my mind it would have been wiser to stay with a line-up as close to the World Cup winners as possible and then take it from there. Test matches, as every one of De Villiers’s predecessors learnt, have to be won and it might have been more prudent to confront the Welsh with a combination moulded through many crises – especially as there is the test against Italy, speaking realistically and with no disrespect intended, in which some of the newer faces could have been introduced to the pressure of “wearing the jersey.”

We seem not to have absorbed the lesson that test match rugby compared to the Super 14 is as Formula 1 is to speedway.

Although I believe the Springboks should see off the Welsh quite handsomely, in spite of their Six Nations champions status and the extra grit brought in by New Zealander Warren Gatland, I fear that we may be lured into a false sense of security only to be rudely awakened in the Tri-Nations when we travel to Wellington and Dunedin (where the Boks have never won) to play the All Blacks.

Nothing impacts on the fortunes of the Springbok team (and their coach) as negatively as defeat and I’m seeing an all too familiar pattern re-emerging of a new set-up breaking down what was good rather than maintaining the model and making subtle changes when necessary.

Here’s hoping that we are very good as world champions; here’s hoping that it does not take another 12 years before we win the Webb Ellis Cup again.

?The first installment of “Springbok Saga”, a 13-episode series tracing the history of Springbok rugby from 1995 to 2007, will be shown on SuperSport on June 25.