Bok management team should reflect commitment to excellence

It may be time to rethink the South African rugby policy that the coach should get the management team that he wants.

While the practice is in keeping with rugby trends in the professional age, the choice of management personnel by recent Springbok coaches has invariably led to problems further down the road.

Both Nick Mallett and Harry Viljoen were guilty at times of making appointments that were based on their comfort with the officials in question rather than whether they were necessarily the best available in their particular field of expertise.

This meant that when the coach was axed or resigned, these officials were lost to the management team on the basis that the replacement did not want to be associated with appointments made by his predecessor.

So bang went any chances of continuity and once again the most experienced tourists in the travelling party ended up being some of the people travelling in economy class as journalists.

How many survivors were there from Mallett's management team when Viljoen took over? Unless I have missed someone, you should not require more than one finger to count them.

And even Phil Mack, who toured on that first trip to Argentina, appeared to be a supernumery in that "fitness adviser" was also the designation of Chris van Loggerenberg.

SA Rugby chief executive Rian Oberholzer may want it otherwise, but the new coach will probably dispense with the services of one of Viljoen's most controversial appointments, Tim Lane.

Wait, don't stop reading! This is not another article written in defence of Lane. My disdain of the SA Rugby decision to disqualify all foreign coaches from consideration for the Springbok job will be the subject of a later column for it is a seperate issue.

For now the chief concern is the problematic situation which can be created when a coach is given too much licence in the appointment of his management team.

Yes, the coach should to some extent get what he wants. But surely SA Rugby, who do the appointing, should know what they want from the Springbok management too.

Within reason, the new management team should not be the result of a list drawn up by the Springbok coach, but the product of a negotiation process in which both parties get to communicate what they want and why they want it.

Former WP coach Alan Zondagh made a lot of sense when a few weeks ago he suggested that a grading system be instituted for South African coaches.

That grading system should extend to assistant coaches, technical directors, fitness advisers, physiotherapists and doctors.

This way the new coach will have a list of highly qualified people to work off when assembling his staff. More importantly, he will have ratings to guide him.

If there is a good reason for a new Springbok coaching appointee not to work with the top assistant, fitness man or physio, he must furnish his objections for the consideration of the SA Rugby Board.

Gert Smal, for instance, could probably make a good case for why he should have Carel du Plessis at his side. But given how poor the Sharks backs were after Butch James' injury, I am not sure that Rudolf Straeuli, if he is appointed as Viljoen's successor, should be able to make the same demands for his backline assistant in Durban.

Indeed, it would make a lot of sense for SA Rugby, when or if they sit down with Straeuli to talk about the Springbok job, to make it a proviso of his appointment that his management team should accomodate Du Plessis (who appears to be the only "backline coach" in this country who actually performs that function).

That way the new Springbok management team would buy in to the strengths of both the top two provincial teams in the country.

The benefits to be had from such a partnership should be obvious and there are not many who would have a major problem with a "Rudolf and Carel show".

At a time when the management is being criticised for being too unwieldy, this may sound like it comes out of left field, but is it not time to take some of the heat off the man in the hot-seat by selecting a management team as a package rather than just one man to do the job?

My understanding is that the previous appointment was sold to Sarfu executive members as a Viljoen/Andre Markgraaff package but no-one had bothered to inform Viljoen (or for that matter the media or the public) of this.

If the coach can come up with his own package and motivate it, that is all well and good. If he cannot then SA Rugby should build a management package (a package of people) based on their knowledge and understanding of who the best people are for a given function.

In that way they would be committing themselves to performance excellence, something which has not always been a priority in South African rugby but which may be vitally necessary as a first step towards re-establishing the country on the world rugby map.