Jake has dug his own hole

It was hard not to feel some sympathy for Springbok coach Jake White when some of the media reports and press headlines following the Brisbane match started to circulate on Sunday.

Everything that went wrong with the Boks appeared to be heaped at the door of the coach, and several former Springboks offered the opinion that he should resign.

Of course, the reality is that the failure of the national team on the field does not all come down to the coach. And humiliating though it was, the defeat suffered by the Boks this past Saturday was not completely unexpected if you recall some of the rubbish dished up by our Super 14 teams in February, March, April and May.

The Boks who made elementary mistakes in Brisbane also made those same mistakes in the Super 14. The brainless rugby played by the national side over the past month and a bit has not been completely out of synch with what we saw from our sides at Super 14 level.

Several experts, including former Wallaby great David Campese, said it at the time, but it is worth repeating – our players lack in skill and in rugby intelligence.

White cannot possibly be blamed for everything that goes wrong with the Boks, and you have to say that, given what was said earlier about Super 14 performance, he achieved something of a miracle in dragging the Boks from sixth in the world up to as high as No 2 just a short while ago.

Up until a short while ago, I was one of White’s biggest supporters. His success rate with his “hunches” about certain players was just too good to ignore and it was my belief that he had earned himself the right to a bit of leeway when it came to selection.

However, White is now making too much of a habit of ignoring what is sometimes blindingly obvious, and he does appear to have picked up a disease I once dubbed, for the purposes of a magazine article, “The Madness of the Springbok coach”. In many cases it manifests itself as a self-destruct mechanism that gets pushed at precisely the wrong moments.

I was away from civilisation for a while last week, but when I returned it was interesting to go through some of the back-copies of newspapers that had accumulated on my front door and which had come out before the Australian test.

Every man and his dog seemed uncomfortable with the loose trio selected for the Brisbane game, and it was comforting for me to know that I was not alone in thinking that the Boks have erred in neglecting the flank who has the specialist function of playing to the ball (White keeps side-tracking everyone by talking about his fridge when we mention the word fetcher, so let’s just not call it that).

It really isn’t rocket science. All three players who made up the Bok loose-trio in Brisbane are known to be players you more often see in an upright position carrying the ball. The Aussies had in George Smith a player who you invariably see much lower to the ground, foraging for the ball, securing it for his team when they have possession, or slowing it down for the opposition when they are in possession.

And hey, when I go on about this like a dog trying to grab at a bone, it is not because I want to push the case of WP captain Luke Watson. Watson is not the only genuine opensider in South Africa, and it amazes me that White has forgotten the real unsung hero (in my opinion) of his national under-21 team’s triumph at the 2002 World Cup. It was, in fact, Roland Bernard, whose breakdown skills virtually won the trophy for his team.

But his decision to blind himself to the virtues of a genuine openside flank (Solly Tyibilika, by the way, does a lot of running around during a game, but his actual breakdown skills are not on a par with other players mentioned) is not really what has done White in.

His biggest blunder was undeniably his public spat with SA Rugby over the extension to his contract, a furore which must have undermined both the confidence of the players as well as lose him a lot of support from would-be fans.

I wrote at the time that he would come out smelling of roses if his team beat France, but it would backfire horribly if they lost. They did lose, and White, and South African rugby, has been suffering for it ever since.

For the good of the game in this country, White must ask himself two questions. Firstly, is he really still 100% committed to the Boks, and secondly, are there players in the country who could forward the Bok cause but are being ignored because he has a personal issue with them?