Geography must not be a factor

This may irritate some, but here is the reality - the next coach of the Springboks will be a Cape man.

Yes, like it or not, Harry Viljoen's successor as Springbok coach will be based at the business unit, which has moved in with employees of SA Rugby (Pty) Ltd into the offices previously occupied by SARFU on the top floor of the Sports Sciences Institute in Cape Town.

That means the Springbok coach will continue to live in closer geographic proximity to players and officials from the Cape.

More significantly, the main decision maker will continue to be exposed to the leanings and opinions of the WP besotted Cape press more than the media of any other province.

Put another way, if the new coach is from outside of the Cape, he will relinquish much of his contact with the officials and players that he worked with when he coached at Currie Cup and Super 12 level.

The reason I point all of this out is because of a disturbing statement spotted in a newspaper after Harry Viljoen's resignation as Springbok coach: "Already it is being said that we must not have another Springbok coach who comes from the Cape".

This would presumably mean that Gert Smal should be disqualified from the race for the fact he lives in Cape Town. Rudolf Straeuli would come into the equation because he is from outside the Cape. And those who proposed Andre Markgraaff doubtless did so on the sole basis that he did not hail from a coastal province.

Ah, how complicated provincialism makes this whole business of choosing a Springbok coach. What we are saying here is that the new guy should not necessarily be the best, but should come from the right place.

Now I would be the first to agree that some Springbok teams of the not too distant past have been too overloaded with Cape players and at times there has also been an overload of Cape philosophy. Nick Mallett was probably a lot more guilty of this than Harry Viljoen.

But we have to pity anyone who would consider clouding such an important decision with considerations such as the candidate's current place of domicile.

A few years ago, there may have been reason for the apparent leaning by Springbok coaches towards players they had coached at provincial level. Ian McIntosh, when he was appointed, continued to live in Durban. As he spent large parts of the year without a team to coach, it was understandable that he was fairly frequently spotted on the King's Park outerfields watching his former team train.

It was also not a complete shock to see him present at the odd Natal Rugby Union function. The same could be said for Mac's successor, Kitch Christie. He continued to live in Johannesburg, and this enabled him to see the talents offered by Transvaal second-stringers (hooker Chris Rossouw) and under-21 players (scrumhalf Bennie Nortje was invited to a Springbok training camp).

Presumably it was because he also lived in Kimberley, which is a relatively small place, that Andre Markgraaff, when he coached the Boks in 1996, saw something nobody else in the country could see when he decided Griquas flanker Theo Oosthuizen was a worthy replacement for Francois Pienaar.

Of course, living in the same place did not always mean you went with players from that region. I know Mac read a lot of the pro-Natal garbage I wrote in the Natal Mercury during those years, but I never could sway him into selecting Gary Teichmann and Dick Muir.

That was left to subsequent coaches to do. And Carel du Plessis, when he coached in 1997, clearly never took any notice of what myself (Cape Argus) or Mark Keohane (Cape Times) thought of some of his selections.

The point of all of this is that in the professional era the old provincial arguments live on only in the minds of journalists and disaffected players/officials with an axe to grind - the latter group of course still being all too prevalent in our rugby.

If Rudolf Straeuli does become the next coach, what is he? Is he a former Blue Bull and Transvaal flanker, or is he the most recent Natal coach who for some reason should still hold some allegiance to that union?

For the record, Straeuli was at university at Stellenbosch and has thus spent more of his life in the Cape than in Durban. Of course Smal is not a good example as he did play for WP, but it is a fact that there is less of that old loyalty you used to see in the amatuer era, when someone like Hugh Reece-Edwards retarded first his development as a player and later his potential as a coach by refusing to be disloyal to the province where he had been taught the game.

There are those who would argue the point, but although he was based in the Cape, Viljoen was never really regarded as a WP man by the Newlands die-hards. He had, after all, built his coaching reputation in Durban and Johannesburg. True, there were a lot of WP players in the Bok squad at the start of last season.

But during the course of the year Viljoen dropped Percy Montgomery when many felt the Cape man was playing his best rugby. He also left out Braam van Straaten when the rest of the country - yes, even those in the north and in Durban - thought he should be a must at flyhalf.

On Viljoen's first tour with the Boks he ignored the claims of WP lock Hottie Louw, who he generally treated very shabbily. And now we come to his biggest mistake of all - the omission of Corne Krige from the initial squad to tour Britain and Europe late last year.

Was not this the same Krige who captained WP, supposedly Viljoen's province, to two momentous Currie Cup successes? Talk of Krige brings me to another point. There are many outside Cape Town, and some in the city, who are hoping that Viljoen's departure might mean the end of Bob Skinstad as captain.

But if Skinstad does go, which I don't believe he should, who is the obvious man to replace him? I would say that the aforementioned Krige should be the obvious, maybe the only, choice.

Yet he comes from the Cape, surely not something to recommend him to the many who feel that the supposed WP dominance of the Bok team should stop. Surely that example should be enough to highlight the silliness of adding geography to the already complicated set of parametres that South African rugby officials and Springbok selectors have to work with.

If Smal is deemed to be the best available candidate, then he should be appointed.

Likewise any English, French, Japanese, Mauritian, Portuguese, Asian, American, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, male, female, heterosexual or homosexual who has the right credentials for the job...