A look back at a roller-coaster year

The South African leg of the IRB Sevens Series in George put an end to rugby for the year in the southern hemisphere, and in some ways the performance of the Blitzbokke summed up the past 12 months for rugby in this country.

Whereas in the Sevens season ending in June 2009 the Boks had moulded themselves into such a serious force - as they won the IRB Series for the first time - that coach Paul Treu was a serious contender for the IRB Coach of the Year Award, they have not come close to scaling those heights since then.

Two seasons ago the Boks celebrated their first George title, and it set them up for their series triumph. They had gone into the South African leg with high hopes, and they delivered. This time there were not such high hopes, which was why a win in the Plate event was celebrated. Standards, and expectations, have been lowered.

It’s been like that with the Springboks in the conventional 15-man code too. Before the 2009 end-of-year tour, the Boks were in No 1 position on the IRB world rankings and had dominated the Tri-Nations to the extent that they won five of their six games. But by the middle of last month they had dropped to third on the rankings, and were in danger of being pushed to No 4.

The slide started for the Boks not long after they clinched the Tri-Nations, however, with naïve selection and strategy contributing to an embarrassing defeat for the Bok midweek team at the hands of an under-strength Leicester Tigers unit – and it set the tone for a tour that saw the South Africans lose two test matches and one more midweek game.

The big win over France in Cape Town in June of this year erased part of the memory of that, and although they did struggle in the first test against Italy, there was no apparent reason for Bok fans to fear the Tri-Nations. After all, South African teams had dominated the Super 14, with the Bulls and the Stormers meeting in the final.

But a mixture of the complacency, which is perhaps the inevitable consequence of a player-driven system that is too lop-sided in favour of the players, and lack of tactical innovation at a time when law interpretation changes had changed the way the game was played, caught the Boks short.

Whereas 12 months earlier their suffocation strategy had seen them lose just once, in 2010 they won just once. Along the way they were hammered by New Zealand in successive weeks, with the 20-point score difference in the first test in Auckland – and it wasn’t much closer than that in the second in Wellington – in no sense flattering the All Blacks.

The Boks never came close in Brisbane against Australia either, and while the closeness of the battle at the FNB Stadium in skipper John Smit’s 100th test match suggested there was some hope, the fact the All Blacks were able to win coming from behind in front of nearly 100 000 passionate South Africans told us how far the Kiwis had forged ahead.

At least Victor Matfield was able to celebrate his landmark century in some style, but the way the Boks had to fight back from a big early deficit against the Wallabies at Loftus was not encouraging. And when the Wallabies did the same the following week in Bloemfontein, and this time managed to thwart the fightback with a last-gasp Kurtley Beale penalty, it was the first time that they had won at altitude against Australia since the early 1960s.

In six matches in the Tri-Nations the Boks conceded 22 tries, and yet defence had been such a strong point both in the World Cup-winning year and en route to their 2009 Tri-Nations trophy. As the stats suggest, the slide was alarming.

Attempts to modify the management team in the two months between the end of the Tri-Nations and the start of the end-of-year tour floundered, not least because of reluctance on the part of top coaches to work with Springbok head coach Peter de Villiers.

In the end the Boks, because of the need to regain some pride in the brand, decided against resting the top players for the tour of the UK and Europe, but a spate of injury withdrawals still left them some way short of full muster.

But most of those withdrawals came at the back, with the return of Bakkies Botha and Bismarck du Plessis arguably strengthening the tight five that had played in the Tri-Nations season, and in northern conditions that meant the Boks had enough grunt to win more games than they lost.

The highlights were the wins over Ireland in the wet and the rousing display against England at Twickenham that may well have saved the Bok coach his job following the ignominy of a loss to Scotland the previous week.

But the three wins in four test starts did not satisfy everyone, and when a Bok selection featuring some of the most talented young players in the country looked so bereft of a plan in losing to a scratch Barbarians combination in the final match of the tour, it served as a reminder that all is still not completely well.

Clearly a lot of thinking needs to be done, both by the Bok management and by those who employ them, before the proper planning can start for the World Cup, which is due to be played out in New Zealand next September and October.

What is not debatable is that the talent is available, for this was shown in a season in which the Bulls won the Super competition for the third time, and second in succession, and in which the Stormers went through unbeaten against New Zealand opposition.

The mastermind of the Stormers’ tactical game, Rassie Erasmus, keeps getting mentioned as a possible technical adviser, and if that was to happen, it would be a massive boost to the Bok chances of retaining the World Cup. Tactical innovation and expertise is what they lacked in 2010 more than anything else.

And with John Smit set to captain a Sharks team that will be adopting John Plumtree’s busy attacking style in Super Rugby, we may well find that when we reach July and the next Tri-Nations the Boks will be more clear on the way forward than they ever appeared to be this year.