Mallett paying for sins of employer

There was an advert in a Cape newspaper at the weekend which summed up just how confident most Western Province rugby fans were that their team would advance to a Currie Cup final showdown with the Blue Bulls at Loftus Versfeld.

On Sunday morning there was an advert in the Weekend Argus inviting fans to fork out R2100 to “take a train to Loftus” for the Currie Cup final.

Now I don’t imagine that there is an entrepreneur in Cape Town stupid enough to imagine that there are enough Cheetahs supporters in the town to fill a train to Pretoria. So it appears that like many of us, two assumptions were made: firstly that WP would get through, and secondly that the game would definitely be against the Bulls.

The second part was almost wrong too, but the intrepid entrepreneur should not feel alone in having egg on his face today. There are a lot of us who do. My money was firmly on WP just because I thought they had learned their mistake from a year ago, when they slipped to defeat against the same Cheetahs side.

Carel du Plessis lost his job because of that performance, and when the Stormers went on to perform dismally in the Super 12, that was the end of Gert Smal too. But if there is one thing that has emerged crystal clear from this miserable season for Cape rugby, it is that there was a heck of a lot more wrong with WP rugby than the identity of the coaches.

Nick Mallett, WP’s director of rugby, may argue otherwise, but there has been little real noticeable onfield progress since Du Plessis and Smal vacated their posts.

And don’t try and tell me that a 39-3 loss to the Bulls at Loftus is an improvement on a 75-14 defeat, for the former does not represent a competitive effort either.

Not unless you have lowered your standards completely, and are prepared to rate yourselves alongside the real also-rans of Currie Cup rugby, the provinces who boast maybe a tiny fraction of your yearly budget.

That is my biggest problem with WP rugby at the moment. We keep hearing that this is a rebuilding period, and that WP are starting from scratch again. But try and explain to me how a province that has more first choice Springboks on its books than any other union has to rebuild?

Try too to explain how WP are now being seen to be on a par with the Bulls of four years ago, when Heyneke Meyer started to build his dynasty from a base of almost zero?

Sorry, this does not make sense to me when I still have a strong recollection that the Stormers contested last year’s Super 12 semi-final and hammered the Blues in Auckland.

They also, let me remind you, beat the Bulls convincingly twice: once in a friendly in Dubai, and then again in the Super 12 league game at Newlands. This was not last decade or last century, but just last year.

So what has changed? The players who have been lost since then are Corne Krige, Selborne Boome and Daan Human. I have always been a bigger fan of Krige than most, but surely he did not mean that much to WP that they should suddenly become minnows when he departs?

Boome was another of my favourite players, but he was not a Frik du Preez or Colin Meades, and neither was Human ever rated as a world beater either.

But maybe we are edging nearer now to WP’s main problem. At the time Meyer was just starting his rebuilding effort at the Bulls, too many good WP players were leaving for overseas.

Players like Boome and Hottie Louw may not have been the lock pairing that Bakkies Botha and Victor Matfield have become, but their presence at WP might have made a big difference now in that they would help ease the maturation of young Andries Bekker and Ross Skeate.

And Cobus Visagie left a massive void not just at WP but also in South African rugby.

Let’s not forget Robbie Kempson either, or Charl Marais.

You would have noticed these players mentioned, with the exception of Krige, are tight forwards. Which suggests that maybe WP’s problem is not so terminal. A tight five is after all made up of just five players, and some of those already playing for WP do have a bright future.

But it is my contention that Mallett is now paying for the sins of the people who employ him. When Joe van Niekerk was lured to WP a few years ago, some of us rugby scribes asked WP managing director Rob Wagner why he was contracting a loose-forward when he should be looking for tight forwards.

We were told that we were barking up the wrong tree, and that tight forward was not the problem we thought it was. Since then Van Niekerk has struggled more than he has shone for WP, where his star has been overshadowed by the emergence of Schalk Burger. And it has been the same story with another big high profile WP loose-forward buy, Luke Watson.

The problem for WP is that all their tight forward talent at the moment is emerging talent rather than the finished product, and that the players they should have contracted years ago are now tied up by other unions.

They say you reap what you sow. WP rugby is now reaping the bitter blasts that were promised by mistakes made in 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003. I know that Smal was as concerned about all of this as I was, so I cannot see how the former coaches were to blame.

What is to blame is an attitude of “we need to buy players who will draw in the crowds” as opposed to “we need to contract the grinders that will win us a Currie Cup”.

Even the best show ponies need something in front of them…