Boks on treadmill to nowhere

The confirmation of the end of year Grand Slam tour and the one test trip to Argentina has again highlighted one of the biggest problems facing South African rugby - we have an administration which has a greater need for money than it has common sense.

For the record, the Boks will start their tour against Wales in Cardiff in the first week of November, and they will finish it in Buenos Aires in the month of December. The Currie Cup final, instead of being played at the end of October, will now be played on October 16 to accomodate the extra games on tour.

Presumably by switching the domestic final forward by a fortnight, the Sarfu administrators reckon that they are buying time for the Boks so that they can get together earlier and have enough time to recover from the provincial competition before tackling Wales, Ireland, England, Scotland and Argentina in successive weekends. That, at least, is an improvement on previous tours, where sometimes the Boks were in action less than a fortnight after the Currie Cup ended.

But the three week break between Currie Cup final and the test against Wales will not be enough for the Springbok squad members to get away from rugby in that time. We can assume they will go straight into a training camp, and the business of rugby will be uppermost in their minds from then until the end of the tour a month and a half later.

To accomodate the switch in date of the Currie Cup final, some league matches will now be scheduled for the Friday night of the home Tri-Nations tests. This does not just mean additional weeks of understrength Currie Cup rugby, which no-one should be crazy about, but also that those players who make the Springbok squad subsequent to the Tri-Nations will be playing non-stop, week in and week out, from the beginning of the Currie Cup season in late June, early July.

The scheduling of the extra test matches also means that the tour will now cut into precious recovery and rehabilitation time at the end of the year. The test schedule may change, but the Super 12 requirements never do - everyone involved in the Bok tour, or at least those who do not suffer injuries as a result of the ridiculous workload, will have to be back in training at the beginning of January.

Professor Tim Noakes of the Sports Sciences Institute must be bulking at the news that the Boks now have extra matches at the end of the year. He told me a few years back that the end of year tours were shortening the playing life-span of our top players and preventing them from performing at their optimum.

At the time of our interview, he used the example of Gary Teichmann and Henry Honiball, who undertook the last Grand Slam tour in 1998 at a time when they should really have been recovering from an arduous southern hemisphere international season, where the Boks won the Tri-Nations for the first time, but who should really have been resting in preparation for the World Cup campaign the following year.

Few will need reminding that Honiball ended up spending most of the following year injured, and that early season injuries to Teichmann contributed ultimately to Nick Mallett's decision to controversially drop him as Bok captain.

Now, unlike some other critics, I have always stopped short of criticising Mallett for taking Teichmann and Honiball with him on that tour. He told me in private conversation after a press conference where I had asked some piercing questions on the issue that Teichmann would never accepted being left out as no player wanted to turn down the money they got from match fees.

That is fair enough, but then isn't that one of the arguments used by those who lobby for the national contracts to be less based around match fees?

The real problem though lies with an administration that accepts these tours in the first place. And the reason they do it is for the same reason that every player will bust a gut to be on the trip regardless of the long-term effects on their career and the damage it does to their bodies - they want the money.

Reports have indicated that Sarfu/SA Rugby will benefit from the extra game against Wales by R10-million (normally the visiting union does not claim from the gate) per agreement with the Welsh Rugby Union. That is a nice tidy amount for a sport which is suffering financially as a result of the strengthening of the rand against the US dollar, and why not use the players to get the end of year financial statement to read a credit instead of a debit.

But surely at some stage someone in the Sarfu administration has to heed the advice of the scientists and realise that this hectic schedule is counter-productive in the way it shortens careers and limits the potential of South African rugby's primary assets.

There is a reason why the South African Super 12 teams have been less plagued by injuries this year than in previous seasons. Yes, there has been a step forward in the conditioning, but it also helped that last year's World Cup campaign finished at the beginning of November (around about the time the Currie Cup would), which meant extra time for the players to recuperate and prepare themselves for 2004.

That the international schedule impacts heavily on the players can also be gauged from the much better injury record boasted by the Stormers this year. Last year there were fewer Western Cape players in the Bok side, and as a result of that there have been fewer attrition related injuries to complain about.

All things considered, it should not really be necessary to go into a detailed analysis of why it is argued that the IRB and Sarfu are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

It should be self-evident to anyone who has ever failed to exercise caution when training for something demanding physical conditioning, and as Ollie le Roux once said, it is simply impossible to peak in March, April and May for the Super 12, then again for the home tests in June, and then yet again in July, August, September, October and November when the Tri-Nations, Currie Cup and end of year tour take place.

It may swell rugby's coffers, but all this touring just damages the product. And allowing that to happen is just stupid.