Lack of continuity is at the heart of SA's Super 12 failure

Watching the Brumbies train has always been an education and this week's visit to their practice ground nestling against the impressive backdrop of the 12 Apostles standing sentinel over Camps Bay was no different.

It was not so much what they did during their training that was so impressive, for if the truth has to be told I arrived just in time to see them round off their last drill before heading for the combis which whisked them back to their hotel.

Which is the point of my admiration for them. Just as they always seem that little bit quicker than the South African teams in onfield execution, they also somehow manage to get all that impressive organisation done in a minimal amount of time.

Whereas we South Africans are used to watching training sessions which sometimes extend beyond three hours in duration, the Aussies manage to cram everything into an hour.

And it is not as if they have that many cramming sessions, either. When the Waratahs were here a few weeks back, their coach Bob Dwyer admitted that his team had spent so little time during their stay actually training that he was worried that they might take a holiday atmosphere onto the field with them.

Fat chance. The Waratahs ran onto Newlands as keyed up as ever and were the first to score in a game where the apparent instinctive understanding between the players was a standout feature for the winners.

So how do they do it? Maybe an Aussie journalist who is travelling with the Brumbies summed it all up when he watched the Stormers train earlier in the week.

"Mate, how long is this going to go on for? This is one of the longest training sessions I have ever been to," he complained as the Stormers headed towards the two hour mark on a sweltering Villagers field.

"The Brumbies never train longer than an hour. And when it is in season they hardly train at all. They do all their work in the pre-season phase."

If I had not seen it countless times myself over the years I would not have believed a word he was saying. But it is true.

While our teams are forced to pull out all the stops during the season, the Australian teams use sessions during the tournament to just fine-tune the odd move and make sure that all the pistons are clean and in sharp working condition.

There are several reasons for this and together they add up to a significant contributing factor to the failure of South African teams in the Super 12.

Yes, part of it is old school mentality. The old koppestamp sessions are not quite as forgotten in some provinces as they are in others and in too many unions the players are forced to sweat it out when they should really be resting.

Part of Ian McIntosh's secret at Natal was his refusal to push the players too hard during the part of the season when they faced their toughest games.

But overtraining is unavoidable when a team is disorganised and less than ready for the challenge. In such a situation a coach has to choose between the lesser of two evils, which in a sense is what Harry Viljoen did when his tired and jaded Springboks gathered at the end of last year's epic Super 12 struggle for a national training camp in Plettenberg Bay.

A glance at the circumstances faced by each South African Super 12 coach may give an insight into why their teams fall so far behind the Brumbies.

While the Australian sides are mostly settled combinations which benefit from continuity of both playing personnel and coaches, this is not the case with the South African sides - at least not the ones that are battling.

Heyneke Meyer of the Bulls and Cats coach Frans Ludeke both had to start out fresh as coaches of Super 12 squads that did not boast much in the way of settled combinations and experienced players.

It would not be wrong to suggest Meyer has authored his own downfall with poor selection. But no matter who he chose in his region, he would have had to turn to players who were either inexperienced or were part of a losing culture in previous seasons.

Once it became apparent that there was not going to be a big influx of star players from elsewhere, he was always up against it.

Ludeke faced an even stiffer task. As his predecessor Laurie Mains pointed out in his new trading as Highlanders coach this past week, blooding youngsters can only be done successfully if it is done around a core of experience.

Departures to the northern hemisphere and Japan, coupled with the injury rate, have conspired against Ludeke. Already a young, inexperienced coach, he found himself in the unenviable position of having to follow on from Mains without former captains Rassie Erasmus and Andre Vos, the experience of Andre Venter, backline kingpin Japie Mulder and Johan Ackermann, who was very much the kernel of the Cats pack during the Mains era.

David Nucifora, the Brumbies coach, also faced a turn-over of personnel when he took over from Eddie Jones. Joe Roff is playing elsewhere this year, as is Rod Kafer, who was very much the backline playmaker under Jones.

But the Brumbies players who trained at Camps Bay High School were by no means a bunch of greenhorns. The big names of the team have all been part of the Brumbies success story from year dot - Gregan, Finegain, Larkham.

The bulk of the rest have all been eased in during the past few years alongside players who boasted experience and an intimate knowledge of the Brumbies way.

I wrote last year that the Brumbies triumph in the Super 12 was a victory for their succession planning. It is true too of their 2002 campaign. Unlike many of the South African coaches, Nucifora did not have to start from scratch.

It is easy to hurl brickbats at Ludeke and Meyer for not implementing a succession planning programme last year. But how can we do that if neither of them were then even part of the management of the respective teams that they now coach?

They are by no means blameless for the current mess, but their failures can at least partially be ascribed to the fact that their respective teams have almost had as many coaches as there have been seasons since the start of the Super 12 era. The Brumbies have had only three, and it is unsurprising that they are the team of the moment.

The Sharks, who are historically the most successful local franchise, have also had just three, but it may be significant that their most miserable periods have been either just before or after a long-serving successful coach has either retired or moved on to bigger things.

It also may be no coincidence that the Stormers, who are the current South African team of the moment, draw off a Western Province team that still features many of the key players that guided that union to their historic first Currie Cup title in 11 years back in 1997.

There are not many other provincial teams in South Africa that still bear some resemblence to what they did four years ago.

Mains says part of his job at Otago is to help the young men, Greg Cooper and Wayne Graham, who will succeed him. It is his aim to ease their transition into the highly pressured job they will take over.

This is not the sort of thinking current in South African rugby and it explains why every year so many of our teams play as if the players and coaches have only just been introduced to each other for the first time. Which in many cases they have.