Balancing potential against delivery is difficult

It was interesting to see Bulls coach Heyneke Meyer take a swipe at his critics after his team’s win over the Hurricanes by asking how a good team can suddenly become bad overnight.

My answer to that question is that it should be a difficult thing to do, but that on the recent evidence provided by the South African teams in the Super 12, it is something that is actually quite easy to accomplish.

There can be no denying that when his team lost so comprehensively to the Highlanders the other day, his Bulls had become not just a poor team, but an awful one. For while there may be some truth in that old saying which coaches love trotting out when they justify their decisions to stick with the same team, that form is temporary and class is permanent, there is also a lot of truth in the old adage that you are only as good as your last game.

The conflict between these two contradictory sayings is something that has intrigued me since I started my working life as a sportswriter in 1991. One of my clearest memories from my earlier days is of a prominent Springbok coming up to my Supersportzone colleague Dan Retief, then working for The Sunday Times, during the first post-isolation tour of France in 1992 to challenge him on something he had written a couple of weeks earlier.

The player had played a poor game in one of the earlier matches, but had excelled in the match played the previous day. Retief, when seeing the player approach, held out his hand to congratulate him on his performance. But the player was not interested, he wanted to tell Dan off because in his opinion his most recent performance had vindicated him and had, in his opinion, invalidated the opinion that had been expressed previously.

Of course, this was nonsense, and Dan told him as much. A good game on Wednesday does not alter history and obliterate the bad game you played the previous Saturday. The reality is that one game was poor, the other was good, and the two separate match reports would have reflected this.

We all know that players do have form fluctuations. As Ollie le Roux said two seasons ago, when decrying the huge workload players have to get through in a rugby year, it is impossible for a player to peak for the Super 12, the home tests, the Tri-Nations, the Currie Cup and then also perform on the end of year tour.

Balancing up form fluctuations and the advantages of having a settled team and settled combinations with the need to win today’s game is one of the biggest challenges facing any coach.

Marius Joubert, after he scored his three tries against the All Blacks last year, praised Springbok coach Jake White for sticking with him through a form dip. The writers and broadcast critics all joined in the praise of White – he had got this one right and Joubert had proved that form was indeed temporary and class permanent.

But there is a counter-question: How many poor games should you be prepared to accept before the player eventually comes right? If retaining a good player who is out of form leads to four successive defeats, does the win in the fifth game then justify the losses that were sustained earlier?

By now there will be quite a few readers who should have figured that this column is not really about the Bulls, but about the Stormers. The Stormers are a team chocker-block with Springboks who reigned supreme in the southern hemisphere last year by virtue of their winning the Tri-Nations.

It was on that basis many critics rated them as South Africa’s best chance in ages of Super 12 success. And even now, after two defeats and a draw in four starts, you would have to say that looking at the balance of the side as it is reflected on paper, they are still South Africa’s best prospect.

But the Stormers are fast falling into the same malaise as we saw develop around the Western Province team in last year’s Currie Cup season – the knowledge there is so much class in the unit makes you think it is inevitable that the side will click. Yet, as one week follows the other, it just doesn’t happen.

It is this expectation that keeps the critics away from the coach’s door when he retains the players who are quite obviously not performing. It is hard to knock a coach when he retains a player that you know could just come back in the next game and score three tries.

But then how long should the period of grace be? Right now the Stormers, based on their most recent performances, are not a classy team packed with great players, but a mediocre one packed with players who, because they are not performing, are becoming a liability.

How much should selection policy base itself around past performance and past achievement, and how much should it be based around what is happening on the field this week?

Right now Joubert is not the player who scored a hattrick against the All Blacks. He is a completely different player – he is nervy, lacks confidence (something which may be extremely important to his play) and is not helped by playing for a team which has suddenly decided it should not run the ball but instead hoof it into oblivion at every opportunity.

Ditto De Wet Barry, who ran onto the field full of angry juice in the match against the Brumbies, got pinned for a couple of high tackles, and has as a result of his fear of the watching citing commissioner suddenly become tentative.

Not that Barry has really played that many good games since the Tri-Nations ended, which also may be significant. There are other players who have also battled ever since the moment the final whistle sounded on the win in Durban over Australia last August.

But at the moment those players remain on in the team, not just at Stormers level but also at Springbok level, because there is a feeling that at some stage they will rediscover that lost form and become world-beaters again.

How long though will it take? After all, there are only 11 Super 12 games, and the Stormers have already played four. Hitting the straps in the last game cannot be seen as a vindication of anything if the Stormers are by then out of the race for a semi-final place.

There again, maybe it will come this weekend. Certainly I hope so, for right now there are far too many Springboks, across all the South African teams in the Super 12, who are surviving on past reputation rather than doing the jobs they have been contracted to do today.