Idiotic and unfair to drop Jake

When the Springboks finished off the serious part of their tour with a 25-14 win over England at Twickenham, it should have been the end of the debate over whether coach Jake White should continue in his position.

But it appears that there are still knives out for White in senior levels of the South African rugby administration, and he was still due to undertake a farcical trip home for one day so that he could attend a meeting of the President’s Council where he was expected to explain his poor record on tour.

And as I write, there is still a chance that White might be relieved of his post once the board of SA Rugby have met in George next Friday, December 8. That a coach can be axed after such a good win, which was achieved by a second/third string Springbok team against a full-strength England side at a ground South Africa have not tasted success at since 1997, is not unprecedented in our rugby.

When Nick Mallett’s Springbok scored their record 29-11 win over England nine years ago, it was a result achieved less than three months after Carel du Plessis had presided over a 61-22 win over Australia at Loftus.

That rout in Pretoria turned out to be Du Plessis’s last game in charge. Although the Boks stuffed the Aussies like they had never been stuffed before, it was still not enough to protect him from an administration that deemed it too little too late.

Some felt Du Plessis was on the cusp of a breakthrough, but most critics agreed with the decision to replace him with Mallett. When Mallett’s team then went on to win 17 successive matches (the Loftus result was the first victory in an 18-match winning sequence), it was shown to be the right decision.

It would also not be unprecedented for a coach to be replaced after a positive end to the season preceding a World Cup year. In 1994 Ian McIntosh’s team scored two tries to nil against New Zealand in the final test of a three-match series in Auckland. Only poor goalkicking prevented the Boks from winning, and they had to settle for a draw. Yet how many Springbok teams since then have managed to draw with the All Blacks in New Zealand?

Both of the previous two tests had been closely fought, but it was not enough to save McIntosh. In came Kitch Christie, with the same amount of time left to the World Cup as the Boks have now. He did an ambulance job, in which he held onto many of the positives that had been started by McIntosh, and the Boks won the World Cup just nine months after he had taken charge.

So, a change of coach now would not necessarily be a disaster. There is historical precedent.

Yet it would only work if there was a Kitch Christie or a Nick Mallett waiting in the wings. Flying home from London the other night, I had a conversation with a respected, knowledgeable former player who has also done quite a bit of coaching.

He expressed the opinion that now would be a good time to drop White “as Rassie (Erasmus) is ready to take the job” and could take the Boks to the different level that maybe White is incapable of doing.

I would not necessarily disagree with this if Erasmus was the man earmarked for succession. Knowing the administration of SA Rugby and the foibles of the president’s men, I fear though that they would not take this route, and that if they dropped White, we would end up taking a backward step by appointing someone inferior.

The name Andre Markgraaff is being bandied around by far too many people at the moment for the support he enjoys among some provincial presidents to be mere rumour. Sadly, appointing Markgraaff would have historical precedent too, and it would not be a good precedent.

It will be recalled with some sad sense of irony that Christie’s last match in charge was a victory against England at Twickenham in 1995. We didn’t know it at the time, but it signalled the end of the Bok run of success. Markgraaff took over a few months later, and a sequence of disastrous results followed, including a first ever home series defeat to New Zealand.

Markgraaff was a failure as a Bok coach, and as he last coached in 1999, he is patently not the man to do an ambulance job. And yet we would not put it past the decision makers, for he topped the list of candidates when Rudolf Straeuli was fired in 2003, along with Chester Williams, who had not coached 15-man rugby at all up to that point.

Moreover, if SA Rugby really wanted to fire White, they are also going to have to ask themselves a couple of questions. Firstly, did they not agree to allow White to select an experimental team for this tour, and in doing so, also agree that results were not all that important?

Would White have chosen the team he did, and left players like Victor Matfield at home, if he felt that this tour could lose him his job? I think not. He must have been given some assurances before making the selections.

Secondly, if the South African rugby bosses do not agree with White that now is a time to concentrate on the buildup to the World Cup, and make everything secondary to that, then how is it that they agreed to take the contracted Springboks out of the Currie Cup for the next two years?

White, by putting them through a conditioning camp instead of allowing them to play provincial rugby, signalled that he had a plan he was working on, and SA Rugby, by giving him what he wanted, were signatories to that plan.

To me, it is as simple as that. If SA Rugby bought into the White plan, which they clearly did, then they have no option but to let the coach see the plan through.

To do anything else would be both unwise and also unfair, especially now that White seems to have built such a strong platform of depth ahead of the World Cup. It’s time, for the good of the Springboks, to put aside petty personal politics and make rugby the priority.