Dice was always loaded against Lane

There may be some irony in the way the two big rugby announcements of this week coincided.

On the face of it the axing of Tim Lane as Cats coach has nothing to do with the appointment of John Smit as Springbok captain, but take a closer look.

There are many who will doubtless criticise current Bok coach Jake White for making a captaincy announcement so early in the season. This after all is not a World Cup year and there are several young hookers pushing for the No2 jersey occupied by the new captain.

Yet it was never a secret that White would turn to Smit to lead his team. White and Smit have been close ever since the latter led the 1999 SA under-21 team to victory in an international junior tournament while White was assistant coach. His knowledge of all the players, and their weaknesses, is one of White’s strong points.

The Smit announcement’s link with Lane comes about because in many ways the White/Smit relationship appears to emphasise what Lane lacked at the Cats. While White is vesting his future in a player he knows well, this season Lane had to turn to a captain in Wikus van Heerden who was left out of his squad and sent packing to the Bulls in 2003.

I don’t know which players Lane was close to at the Cats. I am not sure if there was any special trust or bond built up between him and the leadership figures in his squad. What I do know though is that he made life a lot more difficult for himself by basing his selection around what would have appeared to be the logical policy of choosing the best player in each position.

Much has been made of the fact that another foreigner, Laurie Mains, has been by far the most successful Cats coach. He twice got them into the semifinals of the Super 12, and unless my memory is faulty, he is the only coach to have guided them to a finish in the top half of the log.

But while Mains, like Lane, was a foreigner, he did have one big advantage: He was coach of the Lions Currie Cup team, and had guided them to the domestic title before taking over the reigns of the regional team.

In terms of the regional policy of SA Rugby, what Mains did was questionable. But by ignoring the principles of the regional approach and showing scant regard for the Free Staters, the Kiwi did ensure that the core of his team, and the leadership of that team, was well acquainted with his approach.

Remember that Rassie Erasmus and Werner Swanepoel had both been lured to the Lions by the time that Mains took over as Cats coach, so Andre Venter was really the only Cheetahs player in the Cats squad during the 2000 season (Erasmus returned to Free State in 2001, and this coincided with a fall-out with his Super 12 coach and some of the other members of the squad).

Lane, by landing himself in charge of a team with so many philosophical and provincial differences, was on a hiding to nothing from the outset. This is particularly so if you consider that at the start of his tenure he selected a captain in Bob Skinstad who had spent his entire career in the Cape.

Again, the logic was good. Skinstad was always a player who managed to bring the best out of those around him. Skinstad uninjured and at his charismatic best could certainly have had a galvanising effect on the talented youngsters around him, and indeed he did do so for a while during the home run, where teams like the Brumbies and Highlanders were seen off before the Hanyani Shimange sending off turned the tide against them in Bloemfontein.

But unfortunately for Lane, the Skinstad magic did not last, and neither did his fitness. Skinstad, like his coach, might have discovered there was a bigger divide than he had expected between where he had come from (Cape Town) and where he had landed up.

I was one of Lane’s biggest supporters when Harry Viljoen brought him out to the country. I am still not going to concede that he is a poor coach. For the record, the reports that Lane was fired by Australian coach Rod MacQueen are inaccurate. The Australian management that had guided the Wallabies to the World Cup had come to the end of its mission when Lane departed.

At Montferrand he enjoyed considerable success, and his ability might be summed up by the extraordinary growth in the number of players at Montferrand who graduated to the French national team while he was in charge there. He guided that team to the French league title before losing in the final.

But my answer to those who ask me about how I feel about his axing is that I am undecided. There can be no denying that his record at the Cats just wasn’t good enough, and he would probably be the first to admit that he gave the Sarfu administrators who fired him plenty of ammunition to do so.

That there are problems with the way the Cats franchise is configured is not news, but at the same time it would not help if Sarfu just threw their hands in the air and opted to carry on as they were. It was clearly not working and some change had to be made.

Hopefully Chester Williams will bring a breath of fresh air and inject renewed vigour into the franchise. In some ways he is in a win win situation because the Cats play at home from now on, and they can hardly do worse than they have already. At least now we get a chance to see what Williams can do as a head coach.

As for Lane, my big regret is that he never got a chance to coach a team like the Stormers, where there is less petty politics within the team environment and where his philosophies might have been better understood. He might then have shown South African rugby people what he is really capable of.