Heyneke and Rassie are tops

The period building up to a new rugby year is often called the silly season, but the term should apply even more aptly to the ongoing speculation about the Springbok coach and the saga of his helpers and would be consultants.

Last week several names were mentioned as possible replacements for the incumbent assistant coaches, Dick Muir and Gary Gold, and Peter de Villiers’ frantic cap in hand rush around the country in a desperate attempt to find someone who would be prepared to work with him was hardly a secret in coaching circles. Like in all businesses or professions, coaches do talk to one another.

And what is coming out of the coaching grapevine is scary – one top coach renowned for his forward expertise was approached by De Villiers to be a backline coach, another forward coach was asked if he would take up the Bok job and also take charge of the defence, something he has never done before.

What should have been particularly embarrassing from the South African Rugby Union viewpoint was that two of the coaches approached are men who lost out to De Villiers in the selection process for the Bok job back in 2008 – Heyneke Meyer and Allister Coetzee.

It’s hard to imagine any other experienced top coaches using their assistants as a scapegoat for failure as De Villiers has Muir and Gold. When White’s team was going through a slump in 2006 you never heard people calling for the head of Gert Smal or Coetzee, probably because everyone knew White was the boss.

With De Villiers there has always been grey area. The assistant coaches did have influence early in the De Villiers reign, but they ceded that power to the players during the 2008 Tri-Nations campaign, and it is the senior players who have been steering the ship ever since.

Blaming the assistant coaches for the Bok failures was disingenuous for it was not they who made the poor selections that blighted the away leg of the Tri-Nations and blasted the opening to the hole into which the Boks fell during that competition. The assistants don’t have a say in selection.

And it definitely wasn’t they who pontificated on refereeing blunders, gave public voice to allegations of conspiracy against the Boks, stated their support for Bees Roux or accused a top referee of being a racist in a meeting on the eve of an important test match.

The rap sheet on De Villiers is longer than that of all the other post-isolation Bok coaches lumped together, and yet he survives as his bosses cling to the hope that a) they can rescue him by getting him help and b) he may be able to get the team out of the trough like White did in 2006.

The problem with the last mentioned is that De Villiers is not White, who at least got the job on the basis that he was the top candidate to come through the tests set during the selection process. And the first problem is related to that – there clearly aren’t many top coaches who want attach their coaching reputation on De Villiers.

What is certain after the Tri-Nations disaster is that Saru are right in thinking that the Boks need a help of a heavyweight rugby brain, and in that regard there are two men who demand Saru’s consideration – Meyer and Rassie Erasmus.

Meyer should have been the coach from 2008. Coetzee would have been a better candidate than De Villiers if the stipulation was that the new man had to be a black coach, but he had only served at the highest level as an assistant back then. He would be better qualified now.

Yet Coetzee owes much of his recent success to the shrewd rugby brain of Erasmus, who provided the tactical direction to the Stormers during the Super 14 season. Everyone who knows Erasmus knows him as a rugby genius, and while the WP senior team lost this past weekend, the two age-group teams completed a rare back to back double against the Bulls by following up wins at Newlands earlier in the season with wins at Loftus.

Erasmus has driven the impressive WP resurgence, and like Meyer, he has experience of being able to resurrect a province’s fortunes by putting the building blocks and systems in place that ensure future success. They both have experience of helping the coaches who work for them look good.

That is what South African rugby needs right now in the form of a technical director or high performance coach, and both Erasmus and Meyer would do a good job.