Knowin when to rest 'em

The Cheetahs and Lions fans will have to forgive me for saying that the three decent South African teams have now almost completed the New Zealand part of their 2010 Super 14 season.

The Stormers play the Chiefs in Hamilton on Friday and if they win it, it will mean that between them, the Stormers, Sharks and Bulls have only lost two games on New Zealand soil this year.

The Cheetahs still have to break their duck overseas and the Lions have become the whipping boys of the competition. But the general success of the top three South African teams provides further confirmation that any talk of playing in New Zealand being a major obstacle is no longer as relevant as it used to be.

While there have been some good South African wins in New Zealand down the years, it is only in the last few that they have become a regular occurence. It started in 2007, the year the Sharks and the Bulls travelled well and topped the log, with the Stormers also weighing in with some good away wins even though they finished down the table.

And when Ricky Januarie scored the try in Dunedin in 2008 that broke a 10 year drought, the aura of the All Blacks being an unbeatable force at home also sustained a significant dent. John Smit’s men followed it up with another win, in Hamilton, to clinch the 2009 Tri-Nations title.

So with most of the top players having experienced what it is like to win in New Zealand, and some of them doing it fairly regularly, there shouldn’t be any need for the Springboks to be cowed when they travel there for the 2011 World Cup.

Now that the seal has been broken, however, it is important that both the national team and the Super 14 teams continue their momentum building up to the world rugby showpiece event.

There has been a lot of talk about resting players, and the arguments for doing so have validity. But you have to choose the right time to rest those players, and the timing of any rest period could be crucial in determining how much chance the Boks have of being the first team in history to retain the World Cup.

Jake White did rest his top players for the away leg of the 2007 Tri-Nations, just a few months before that year’s World Cup. Yet that World Cup was not being played in New Zealand, and it would have been interesting to see what would have happened had the Boks beaten New Zealand in Durban in their last home match.

Would White not have felt that a Bok triumph in the Tri-Nations so close to the World Cup might bring psychological benefits that would outweigh the physiological drawbacks of the players not getting a rest?

That is a hard question to answer and only White can be 100% sure what he might have done had the Durban game turned out differently and left the Boks with a chance of continuing the hegemony they had created in southern hemisphere rugby that year.

What we do know for certain though is that many New Zealanders blamed All Black coach Graham Henry’s decision to withdraw 22 national players from the first half of the Super 14 league season for his team’s eventual demise.

It may have been a fair criticism, it may not have been. The All Blacks were as hamstrung at that World Cup by their schedule, that saw them play no-one of any consequence before the quarterfinal as by anything they may or may not have done in the preceding four years.

The World Cup is often used to validate a particular theory, but as Brendan Venter pointed out in a newspaper column, that can be a dangerous way of going about it.

As Venter argued, sports scientists who advance the case that the Boks failed to win the 1999 World Cup because Nick Mallett never rested his players are overlooking the fact it was only an extra time Stephen Larkham drop-goal that separated the Boks from success and failure in that tournament.

The theory that they are better off resting is often refuted by players when they are interviewed, and the experience of teams when they come back from a bye week in the Super 14 supports the argument that momentum is a delicate but crucial thing.

Right now South Africa has momentum against the host nation of next year’s World Cup and to willingly relinquish that momentum might be a gamble. Kenny Rogers said in one of his songs that you have to know when to hold them. South African rugby needs to know when to rest them.