Getting comfortable with 15 winning scumbags

Would Shane Warne, with all his talent, have been tolerated in the Springbok team if he were South African and his sporting gifts leaned towards the oval ball game rather than cricket? When you hear that Victor Matfield and Schalk Burger have been ordered to have hair cuts, you have to wonder.

Warne, with that earring of his and the other occasional cosmetic changes to his appearance, would probably not have been tolerated. If the stories about Matfield and Burger are true (Corne Krige wrote about it in a newspaper column), it is quite probable that Jake White would have instructed Warne to have that earring removed.

And if Warne reacted like an adult should in such a situation, by telling the person delivering the orders that his appearance is his own business and the coach can get stuffed, we would probably have the sort of impasse that Springboks had back in 1996 with James Small.

To refresh memories, Small was spotted out at a nightclub a couple of nights before a test match. He was dropped after that and never got to play in the three test series against New Zealand that saw the Boks relinquish their proud record of never having lost to the All Blacks in a series on home soil.

Andre Markgraaff had his rules, and it did not matter that Small was at the time streets ahead of the rest of the South African wings when it came to ability. The Springboks had a strict code, and it needed to be adhered to, even if it meant the play of the team might be compromised.

This sort of thinking counted against Small often during his career. He would surely have played more test matches had other coaches had the ability of Harry Viljoen and Ian McIntosh to manage his many foibles effectively.

But let’s be honest, Small was a difficult character. While you might wonder what would have become of Eric Cantona and Manchester United had overseas football coaches been caught in the same mindset as South African rugby coaches, you do have to accept that rugby is a team game and one recalcitrant individual can sometimes upset that team dynamic.

But haircuts? For goodness sake, do we really have to go through all this silly season garbage all over again? Last year it was Rudolf Straeuli’s decision to confiscate players cell-phones that caught the headlines. Remember too the fuss over the decision by the team leadership to take players names off the Bok jersey.

If you read the newspapers last May, you would have got the impression that the actual playing of rugby, which is what the players are selected and appointed to do, took a poor second place to a myriad of other sideshows.

And it wasn’t new. The previous year Straeuli decided that instead of going to Plettenberg Bay, where Nick Mallett and Viljoen had held their national training camps, the Boks would go to a police college. Oi, how delighted some sections of the media and public were with that decision! And boy, you had to wonder at the column inches devoted to it, and the infamous koppie the players were supposed to run up.

Did they ever run that little hillock made famous by the legendary late Brigadier Buurman van Zyl? I haven’t the faintest idea, and neither do I care, for what mattered to me then and what matters to me now is how the players performed on the field.

In both instances, it has to be said the sideshows did not help the performance, just like the infamous Kamp Staaldraad definitely did not turn the Boks into world beaters at last year’s World Cup.

So far White has been given the benefit of the doubt by this column. We will wait until his team plays before we are overly critical of his selections. But let’s just hope we do not have here another of those Springbok coaches who suffer from the illusion that the secret to onfield success lies in confronting a whole lot of imaginary ogres off it.

Burger played pretty damn well in the Super 12 with his hair like it is, and for the most part so did Matfield. Somehow it is hard to see how being shorn of their locks, and in Matfield’s case getting rid of the bandaging on his arm and changing the logo on his scrumcap, is suddenly going to improve the play of these two individuals.

Quite frankly, most South Africans have got to the point where they wouldn’t care a less if 15 people looking like complete scumbags ran out onto the field to represent the Boks, just so long as they played decent rugby and won the matches that counted.

My advice to White is to judge the players on what they can do on the field, and my greatest wish is that phrases such as “attitude problem” disappear from selection meetings, as should all memories of any off-field personality clash or what may or may not have been said by some players to other people a long time ago.

I have never been sure whether Hennie le Roux, AJ Venter and Andre Joubert missed out on the 1999 World Cup because the coach of the time felt they weren’t good enough, or whether it was because of personality clashes, imagined or real.

Not everyone will agree, but the drive to get the team winning again is also far more important than the ongoing debate, which always seems to get more intense at this time of the year for some reason, about what flower or leaping animal should be worn on the jerseys.

That there is a lobby that says the Springbok must be retained because of a proud history and tradition is understandable. Or at least it would be if you conveniently forget this nation’s divided past. Personally, if calling the Boks a new name will somehow differentiate the new national squad from the one that lost 53-3 at Twickenham, I am all for it.

At the end of the day, what the public wants to see is the team win again, and it should not matter if the players who bring back the country’s pride have a flower on their chest, a leaping antelope or that antelope’s dung.

As for haircuts and appearances, give me a win over the All Blacks and I will be happy to see the national captain going to the post-match interview wearing his underpants on his head.