Mallett’s role in Cape resurgence

As Rassie Erasmus keeps reminding us, the Vodacom Stormers have not won anything yet. This weekend is only round 11 of this year’s competition, and the team’s current fourth position on the log could easily become eighth if they take their eyes off the ball.

But the wheels would have to come off quite spectacularly from here for this Super 14 season to be remembered as anything other than a massive step forward for rugby in the region. Erasmus has played a massive role in the revival, as it is impossible to miss the massive improvements made in precisely those areas where the Stormers lacked previously.

Before Erasmus arrived it was said the Stormers lacked a hard edge. They now have that hard edge. It was also said they lacked structure. They now have structure. No-one can question their conditioning either, and there is also no denying the commitment of the players in the team.

Some previous Stormers teams tended to be dominated by what outsiders considered show-ponies, or at least that was the view in other provinces. Erasmus, when he arrived, made it clear that there was “no I in team”, he set about breaking down the WP/Stormers tendency towards individualism. Under him work ethic, and team ethos, has become paramount, and it is starting to pay handsome dividends.

The Stormers have entertained with their running and handling and their attacking play has profited from the skill levels in the team, but it has been their play without the ball, in other words their defence, and defensive organisation, that has been their biggest strength so far in 2008.

All of this is down to Erasmus and the highly professional team of assistants that he has working around him. Whereas last year Kobus van der Merwe and Jerome Paarwater did everything on their own, the likes of Allister Coetzee, Brendan Venter and Gary Gold, plus fitness adviser Jacques Nienaber and kicking coach Louis Koen, have added a much higher degree of specialisation.

I spent much of last year travelling between Cape Town and Durban, and it always amazed me what a difference there was between a Sharks and Stormers training session. Whereas Dick Muir had a management team working with him in Durban, and the sessions were full of energy and action, the Stormers training sessions tended to lack intensity as the two coaches battled to get everything done.

I haven’t been to a Sharks practice this year, but I am sure that I would not get the same impression now. The bigger management team has made the Stormers routine more streamlined and efficient, there is an air of professionalism that wasn’t there previously.

But while we must laud Erasmus for the massive role he has played in the turn-around, let’s also not forget the man who first approached him to move to the Cape, WP’s former Director of Rugby, Nick Mallett.

There were many who felt, when Mallett was released by WP, that the former Springbok coach and No 8 had contributed little in his three years at Newlands. This was nonsense, and as I argued at the time, he did what he was allowed to do. Ultimately what let him down was his failure to get a heavyweight coach like Erasmus in from the beginning.

Mallett did recognise this mistake himself relatively early in his tenure, but when he recommended that Kobus van der Merwe be sacked he was blocked by administrators and had his powers curbed. He directed his attentions instead to the youth levels, and WP and the Stormers are now reaping the benefits of the structures he put in place.

Just as the 1995 under-21 team set the union on course for success in the later part of that decade, so the massive improvement of the age-group teams at WP – the under-19s and under-21s won their competitions last year – and the Vodacom Cup team are doing the same now.

Mallett spent much of his three years at WP building up the feeder levels and creating the WP Rugby Institute out in Stellenbosch, and much of what is going right in the Cape is because of what Mallett started. His stint as WP director of rugby was not in vain.