Boks millions of miles from nowhere

In the end you have to say that it was the perfect final and the perfect way to end the World Cup. The best team in the world won in the end, and deservedly so, but not before being pushed every inch of the way by the host nation and the best coached team on the planet.

Anyone who wants to deny that the Australians are the most professional team around will have to explain how, with all the pressure they were under throughout the game, they managed to reach a situation where 10 minutes from the end of normal time they had only conceded six penalties.

Both teams possessed highly organised defences, both had their moments on attack, even in the wet, both produced plays that were the product of hours of planning. Overall you would have to say that the deciding game was played between the most technically efficient and organised teams at the tournament.

But there was some irony in the fact that while the two most professional rugby nations were slugging it out for rugby's grand prize, South Africa was once again showing why in many eyes she is regarded as the antithesis of professionalism and modernism.

Those who had followed the Springboks at the tournament found it impossible not to spot the marked contrast between the off-field approach of the South Africans and that of both Australia and England. For the latter two, there were no old-fashioned boys club routines and sex bans.

Players were not made to double up in their hotel accomodation and they were allowed to stay with their wives. The management of those teams treated the players like adults who were in Australia to do a job - which was to produce on the rugby field. The English media on several occasions wrote stories highlighting how relaxed players from both camps appeared to be as they walked around Sydney in the buildup with their wives or girlfriends on their arms.

It is hard to imagine something similar happening with the Boks and there would probably be an outcry if it did. As I wrote in this column two weeks ago, when the Boks made their exit from the World Cup, there is too much emphasis in this country on old-fashioned passion and dying for the cause and not enough stress on skill and scientific preparation.

This view was thoroughly vindicated by the controversy which blew up this past weekend over the boot camp that coach Rudolf Straeuli put his players through just four weeks before the World Cup started.

I knew some of the details of what has been written in the past few days long ago, as did a lot of people. The Bok management would have to be extremely naive if they thought that asking the players to take a vow of secrecy would mean that details of the camp and what went on would not emerge.

The players did talk, which explains why the South African Rugby Players Association representative, Piet Heymans, brought it up when he attended a meeting with his counterparts from countries and New Zealand, England and Australia.

Heymans has said publicly that he had players approaching him who were unhappy with what went on. How does this correlate with the view the senior players and management are putting out that everyone was happy and saw it as a great experience?

There must have been at least some players who were extremely uncomfortable with it, and Gcobani Bobo was brave enough to go public with his dissatisfaction. He disputed the published view that the Bok players grew as people and would have benefitted from the experience.

The attempt by the management and senior players to lay the blame for everything at the door of former Bok media manager Mark Keohane is also disingenious. Keohane was no longer part of the Bok squad when they went to Kamp Staaldraad and he must be an extremely gifted operator if he was able to get all the information that has come out over the past week if there were not disgruntled players within the camp who were keeping him informed.

Where did the photographs splashed over the front-pages of newspapers last week come from? Do Straeuli and Corne Krige think that Keohane may have sneaked into the camp with a camera and snapped away without them noticing him. If Keohane really managed to get into the pit and take those photos without the players spotting him, then he is not just a genius, he is supernatural.

No, the photos were obviously leaked by someone who, like the rest of us, felt uncomfortable with what happened at Kamp Staaldraad and felt that the public ought to know about it. That person had to be someone within the camp, be it a player or management member. And don't bring that baloney about the person in question being paid for it, for I have worked long enough in South African newspapers to know that meaningful money is never thrown around for that sort of thing.

But let's not detain ourselves with speculation on who the leak is. Let's not even concentrate overly on Kamp Staaldraad, for in the end it was just another example of something we ought to have known all along.

Kamp Staaldraad was certainly not the first time the public were alerted to Straeuli's militaristic approach to rugby coaching. If you recall the details of the race fiasco that preceded the Kamp Staaldraad controversy you will remember that players were punished by being made to run until they were crying and vomiting.

At the time there were many who were as shocked by the revelations of the buddy PT the Boks were subjected to as they were about the racism allegations. Sorry, but this sort of thing just does not belong in the professional era and is symptomatic of the archaic mentality that is keeping the Boks back and has the rest of the world laughing at us.

This is an age where the top teams require skill, pace and intelligence. It is not an age where the old "You call me coach and I believe in fitness and discipline" line can suffice.

I know that England attended an SAS Camp at Sandhurst during their buildup to the World Cup. But Heymans was told that this in no way correlated with the sort of treatment that the Boks were subjected to. The England players stayed in beds at night and the problems they were presented with were of an intellectual nature.

Unlike the Boks, where conformity seemed to be the objective, the England players were encouraged to think for themselves. The camp encouraged their creativity rather than emphasised team unity and passion for the cause, which at that level should have already been a given.

The England players were not punished by being made to run, and neither have they ever been.

In the Australian camp at the World Cup was a player who, when he was in South Africa with the Brumbies in 2002, told me how absolutely amazed he and his teammates were when they read a report in a local newspaper about Straeuli's reaction to a defeat suffered by his Sharks team in Auckland during that Super 12.

"Mate, apparently he sent them on a four kilometre run the next day. That is just so funny. If that is the sort of mentality the players have to put up with in South African rugby then I feel sorry for them. When we lose we have a team meeting and we discuss where it went wrong and work on ways to set it right. We would fall over in shock if a coach tried to give us physical punishment."

But it was not the only time that Straeuli behaved like that. When the Boks lost to France in Marseilles last year Straeuli cancelled a planned trip to a wine farm scheduled for the Sunday and put the players through a gruelling training session instead. This was at the end of a week where they had already worked to the point of being over-trained.

Straeuli seemed completely oblivious to the need to have the players rested for the next match and , according to some of the players who were there, he drove them relentlessly throughout the buildup to the match against Scotland. It was no wonder that the players looked so flat when they got to Murrayfield.

It was a similar story in the buildup to the Port Elizabeth test against the Pumas earlier this year. Straeuli made several calls on certain players' ability to play test rugby after that game, but some of those players have told me that they were driven so hard during the week that they were knackered by the time the game arrived.

It was interesting to hear sports psychologist Andre Roux interviewed on Carte Blanche about Kamp Staaldraad. He said that the whole thing was based on a rule by fear, something which correlates completely with what experienced players who were used by Straeuli early in his campaign but then dispensed with have had to say about his coaching.

Talking of experienced players, the images of the camp make it easier to understand why Straeuli was so eager to get rid of what Cobus Visagie recently referred to as "players who have their own minds and ideas".

Brendan Venter, interviewed on Cape Talk radio, says that if he was asked to do the things that the Boks were at Kamp Staaldraad he would have laughed in the coach's face. He said that when he saw the pictures of Kamp Staaldraad in the newspapers he understood why the Boks had appeared lacklustre and lacking in confidence at crucial stages of the World Cup.

But he admitted that at the age of 20 he may have gone along with it as the callowness of youth would have made him less inclined to question the wisdom of it. Ollie le Roux said exactly the same thing. Asked why the Boks did go through with it, Le Roux summed it up very frankly: "They stood to lose half a million rand if they tried to buck the system."

Le Roux's explanation goes some way towards explaining why, when asked to talk publicly, players continue to trot out the party line, as they did in the days after the race controversy. Ask any experienced player who dared to stand up to Straeuli and he will tell you that the coach had no qualms about getting rid of those who stood up to him.

Being in control of the players' livelihood is an essential part of the power that a Springbok coach holds over them. It is for this reason that we seldom hear the truth, at least not publicly, or until after that particular coach has moved on.

An example of this may have come from Krige's mouth last week when he blamed all the ills in South African rugby on previous Bok coach Harry Viljoen. He was happy to be quoted by myself earlier in the year on some of the more bizarre idioscyncracies of Viljoen. He would never have done so had Viljoen still been Bok coach, and hence holding the purse-strings, today.

No, my hunch is that if Viljoen had chosen Krige to be captain, the current skipper would now be arguing for Viljoen to remain as Bok coach until 2007.