Matfield’s axing leaves a fishy smell

When you see that Victor Matfield has been dropped from the Blue Bulls team to play this coming weekend, your immediate reaction goes something to the effect of “So it looks like Jake was right to send him home”.

But when you see that Richard Bands was also dropped at the same time, and remember that Bands is along with Matfield one of the players bringing a legal action against Sarfu, how many people changed their reaction to “Something smells a bit funny around here!”?

I don’t claim to know the inside story of exactly why Matfield and Bands, two of the stars in an impressive Bok pack for most of 2003, are suddenly now consigned to club rugby. Certainly on the evidence of a video recording of last week’s match against the Lions, neither of those players did their cause much good.

At the same time, however, it has to also be acknowledged that off-field uncertainty does affect onfield performance, just as trauma in any person’s life away from his work will have an impact on how he performs for his employer. It is the way life is, and no-one can escape from it, not even a Springbok rugby player.

If Matfield is feeling deflated at the moment, I could hardly blame him. There seems so much uncertainty surrounding his status, and the signs are not good for his immediate future with the Boks.

Sure, there will be those who will say he is not playing well, and as such he deserves to be on the outer. But think about it for a moment: Just a month ago, at Loftus in the game against Wales, Matfield was the Bok man-of-the-match.

The Blue Bull was outstanding in all facets of play that day, and you would not have said he was a player that could so readily be dispensed with. Bok coach Jake White obviously knew that too, for he bent over backwards in the week after the Loftus test in his attempt to make sure that Matfield was fit to tour.

He even included Matfield in the squad as an extra player – remember how the Sarfu offices told us that Matfield’s return was the reason AJ Venter had summarily been axed before even pitching at the training camp. White told us that Matfield would get his air ticket on the basis that he was valuable enough for the Boks to tag him along in the hope that he would be ready for the All Black test.

Matfield never did get onto the field in New Zealand. Instead he was sent home early because the medical team had resolved that he was not ready to play. Back home the doctors had a different view, and Matfield was cleared to play for the Bulls against the Lions.

This naturally prompted questions. The reaction to those questions, posed by the media and public, was for Sarfu chief executive Mveleli Ncula to claim that Matfield was too valuable a player to take a risk on. The feeling of the management was that instead of going to an Aussie or New Zealand specialist, Matfield must return to see Dr Daan du Plessis, the Pretoria based former Springbok prop who specialises in knee injuries.

In doing so, the management were cutting Matfield from the selection equation for the All Black test, but Ncula claimed this was okay as “we cannot risk an injured player”. Of course, SA rugby has always been fertile territory for those who like to probe for contradictions and hypocrisy in public statements. So my immediate reaction to Ncula’s quotes was to ask what the heck Joe van Niekerk and to a lesser extent Faan Rautenbach and Jean de Villiers were doing on tour.

All those players have only recently come back off long injury lay-offs, and all three have had medical people express the view that maybe they are being thrown back into the deep end too quickly. Seeing Matfield was cleared to play, there was little separating his from these cases. But while the Boks are prepared to take the risk with Van Niekerk and company, this is apparently not the case with Matfield.

This is all very confusing, so the people involved in these decisions will have to understand why the media look for reasons why Matfield may be treated differently, and why they remark on what a coincidence it is that Matfield was the one Bok on tour locked in a legal dispute with his employers.

If Matfield really is out of the Bok and the Bulls mix because he lacks conditioning, then all I can say is that for someone who looks so athletic, he loses his fitness incredibly quickly.

It is now a month and a half since I ran the Comrades Marathon, and I have hardly run since then, but when I was talked into running a standard marathon the other day I felt as sharp and as fit as I did in the week building up to June 16. And those who have seen me will vouch that I am not at all athletic. Matfield’s last match before the Lions game was the Wales test on June 26, and even if he was off the pace at Ellis Park last week, he should at the very least be able to quickly regain his match fitness by playing off the Bulls bench.

If Matfield did not look particularly sharp against the Lions, it has to be said he looked no less sharp and fit than Van Niekerk did when he played against the same team for Western Province a few weeks earlier. But Van Niekerk, even though he himself protested that he was not 100% ready, was told to get onto the next flight to New Zealand.

To me it appears that if Matfield lacks anything it is in his psychology. This would be understandable, for as he says, he desperately wants to play for the Boks again, and deep down he must wonder whether the latest turn of events will allow him to do that.

Yeah, we hear those who say that all he need then do is play out of his skin and make it impossible not to be picked. But that reaction goes against the contrary evidence provided by recent and not so recent South African rugby history. James Small, Andre Joubert, Hennie le Roux, Rassie Erasmus and most recently AJ Venter (some would say Luke Watson and Robbie Fleck too) all number among a lengthy list of players who at some stage appeared to be shunned by the Bok selectors for reasons other than their rugby playing ability.

And that is the crux of the problem for me: Matfield and Bands may well be in the wrong here, but for goodness sake, is there not someone on the South African coaching and management firmament who can somehow get these two talented players right and give them the equilibrium that they may require to do what they do best, which is to play rugby?