Making a rod for your own back

It would have been interesting to see Wallaby coach Robbie Deans’ face when he was informed of the Springbok team selection for Sunday’s big World Cup quarterfinal showdown at Wellington Regional Stadium.

Deans doesn’t often give much away with his expressions, but this time his face might have broken out into a broad smile. Leaving out Bismarck du Plessis from the Bok starting line-up is no guarantee that the Wallabies are going to win the game, but their task has been made a whole lot easier.

By bringing skipper John Smit back into the starting team for this game, and opting for Bryan Habana ahead of Francois Hougaard on the left wing, Bok coach Peter de Villiers has hitched his trailer to the experience wagon.

Given what history tells us about the importance of experience in a World Cup play-off game, the fact that the Bok team assembled for this game is the most experienced in international history, with a combined tally of well over 800 caps, might be seen as an advantage.

But even if De Villiers had stuck with Du Plessis and left Smit on the bench it would still have been a highly experienced team. It’s not as if Bismarck hasn’t played international rugby before. And it’s also not as if Victor Matfield hasn’t led the Boks well when he has been the on-field captain. He did it just last week against Samoa, and before that in the good win over New Zealand in Port Elizabeth.

Leaning too heavily in favour of the experience angle can be a fault if it means it makes the team vulnerable in some areas, and I have a nagging feeling that in this instance that is the case.

To explain why, I will draw again on the words I ran in my last column, spoken by dangerous Wallaby fullback Kurtley Beale at a press conference this week.

Beale was asked whether he might tone down the number of times he would be prepared to launch counter-attacks from the back when fielding kicks, given that the match is a play-off game with the attendant extra pressure that comes with it.

His answer gave an indication of how the shrewd Aussies think and play when they are up against South Africa.

“Your first option is always to scan and see what and who is in front of you,” said Beale.

“Against South Africa what you tend to see is a brick wall of players, which means the available option is to kick it back and try and find some space (behind the wall of defenders). Otherwise the other option is to have a crack at the big props up front and try and find a weakness and opening there.

“It will be the same for the other guys in front of me, guys like James (O’Connor), Quade (Cooper) and Diggers (Digby Ioane). It all depends who is in their front line. If there is space there we will take it. If we can’t find it we will look for other options.”

Backline players all over the world in contemporary rugby look to create a mismatch situation where they pit their fleet-of-foot running against bigger and more cumbersome forwards.

But there is also truth in the words of that old Smiths song where they talk about some girls being fat, some girls being fatter than other girls, and some girls' mothers being fatter than other girls' mothers too. In other words, when applied to rugby, some forwards tackle better than other forwards, and some forwards are more mobile than other forwards.

The modern defensive system in particular just doesn’t have room for any chinks, particularly when the opponents are Australia, who are so cunning at sniffing out areas where opponents might be vulnerable.

The Sharks have always been reluctant to choose John Smit and Jannie du Plessis together in the same front row when playing against teams good at exploiting potential defensive weaknesses. Whatever other attributes they may bring, they are not considered strong tacklers, and while it is possible to carry one or the other, it is a massive gamble to field both.

Gamble is what De Villiers has done in this instance, and probably unnecessarily so given that the team doesn’t appear to lose anything when it takes the field with Matfield as the captain. Bismarck was not at his best against Samoa last week, but even a Du Plessis not in top form has to be there for his defence.

The Bok coach has become more relaxed and he has improved immeasurably in most aspects of the job. His selections have mostly been spot on, but up to now there was an assumption he would see sense and choose his best team when the crunch arrived.

Hopefully he will get away with it for I have grown to like De Villiers as a person, but it is as a coach that he has to be judged, and if the Boks do lose on Sunday and he gets pilloried when he arrives home he is going to have to accept that he has made the rod for his own back..