Communication lets us down

One of the most amusing by-products of the way Springbok coaches come and go on such a regular basis is the way the various individuals involved in this game of musical chairs have to keep changing the colouring of their coat.

Here is an example. In 2001 Rudolf Straeuli was coach of the Sharks. When Springbok coach Harry Viljoen denied him use of his players, no-one was more vociferous or outspoken than Straeuli was. He pilloried Viljoen and his management for poor communication.

But a year later it was Straeuli who was in charge and suddenly the boot was on the other foot. “We must put South African rugby, and that means the Springbok team, first at all times,” said Straeuli.

Ironically, one of the provinces most irritated by the way Straeuli chopped and changed his squad was the Sharks, whose new coach Kevin Putt frequently found himself having to change his plans at the last moment.

Straeuli was far from the first Springbok coach who found himself having to send a different tune to suit his change of status and job description. We have seen it happen the other way too.

Carel du Plessis is a good example of this latter breed. The current Western Province coach is more vociferous than most when it comes to criticising the national selectors, and probably rightly so as he has more than once in the past few seasons been subjected to some pretty shoddy communication from the national panel.

But Du Plessis was himself criticised for poor communication when back in 1997 he was the Springbok coach, and ironically…wait for this…Viljoen was the coach of WP. I well remember how irate Viljoen was when Du Plessis withdrew all the test players from Currie Cup rugby in the week that Province were due to play their big game against Natal.

While WP lost all their Boks, the Natalians had two players in Mark Andrews and Pieter Muller who were returning from injuries and needed to have their fitness tested. On this basis, Du Plessis allowed them to play.

“Where is the consistency here?” wailed Viljoen, and the Cape press backed him in his unhappiness.

Seven years later Du Plessis is on the other side of the fence and the same scenario is playing itself out. The WP coach thought he had the services of Neil de Kock for this coming weekend’s round of Currie Cup games, so he duly appointed him captain and trained up until the end of Tuesday with the scrumhalf wearing the captain’s bib.

Down in Durban they thought they could use AJ Venter, so the big forward spent the week building up with his Sharks teammates for the opening Currie Cup clash with Griquas at Absa Stadium.

Then came the notification from national selection convenor to Du Plessis and to Putt that they could not in fact use either of their two key players. De Kock was reluctantly withdrawn by an irritated Du Plessis. The Sharks, driven to the edge by years of what they saw as being messed around by the national selectors, did what people in the Last Outpost are prone to do – they dug in their heels and cried enough is enough.

The upshot was that the national selectors, with Markgraaff as their voice, did a highly petty thing by dropping Venter from the national squad. Not for a moment am I suggesting Natal were not petty in the first place, but it was ridiculous that the player could be allowed to become such an innocent victim in this spat.

The selectors may now think they have got one over Natal because the Sharks, thanks to an injury to Joe van Niekerk, have eventually had to reluctantly agree to the request of the national selectors and have withdrawn Venter from the Currie Cup game.

But if the selectors think they have scored a victory perhaps they should take some time out to consider the public relations damage they have done to themselves during this whole pathetic controversy.

Everything was going swimmingly after the three Bok wins in the warmup tests (and lets not forget that is what they are, the real thing is still to come) and the public mood had shifted in the national teams favour. As I wrote in my most recent column, the focus had shifted from bungling administrators to winning rugby teams.

But the gobbledy gook which spewed from the mouths of the people responsible for running the Springbok team and selecting the players brought the weaknesses off the field right back into profile. We heard from Markgraaff that Natal were being taught a lesson, we heard from acting chief executive Johan Prinsloo that the Venter was being dropped because Victor Matfield was fit again.

Now Venter is back in the squad, but as a flank and not as a lock, and the whole thing has just become so laughable that it almost ceases to be believable.

The sad thing is that unless the people in the provinces are not telling all, this whole mess could have been avoided if the selectors had just brought the one ingredient that has been absent from all their predecessors – proper communication.

When Du Plessis told me on Monday afternoon that he was under the impression that De Kock was available to him as he had been told as much by Jake White the previous week, it came as a massive surprise. Just a day earlier a press release had been issued from the offices of SA Rugby listing the players who were available, and neither De Kock nor Venter was on that list.

Markgraaff is telling the truth when he says that only players who had been previously injured were available to the provinces. He said as much in the press release he issued on Sunday afternoon, and there was certainly no ambiguity.

But if he communicated this to the media, why did he not communicate it to the provincial coaches, who are even more important in that they have to be allowed the opportunity to properly prepare their teams?

More to the point, why was the communication with the media on Sunday different from what the Currie Cup coaches had been told, admittedly by the national coach and not the national selection convenor, in the week before the test against Wales?

It is this sort of inability to properly communicate and to be decisive that causes so much trouble for everyone involved in the job of getting rugby in this country to be a viable business.

Like Viljoen did when he was WP coach and Du Plessis was coaching the Boks several years ago, the Natal officials very publicly and the WP coach slightly less so cried foul on the basis that suddenly it appeared there was lack of consistency. Why were some players who had not played for a long time allowed to play for their provinces and others who are in the same situation but differ only on a technicality not?

This naturally led some, particularly down in “I spot a conspiracy behind every lamppost” Durban, to smell a rat. But yes, it is a problem when the national selection convenor is connected to a province, which in this instance happens to be the Griquas team that would stand to benefit from Venter’s absence from the Sharks side.

There is an easy remedy to this. As Du Plessis says, selectors should be non-aligned, as indeed he and Gert Smal were when they coached and selected the Boks back in 1997, and every other selector with the brief exception of Kitch Christie for a while has been since the end of isolation.

That way no-one can cast aspersions, no-one can allege bias. Not that the problem here is bias, for no-one can accuse Markgraaff of that. Rather it is the perception that is created.

For the real problem that caused the crisis of the past week, the solution is simple: Just jack up the bleedin’ communication. It is a cry that has gone out but fallen on deaf ears for over a decade. It is a simple thing, for goodness sake just get it right.