My problem with Mallett appointment

It is great to see Nick Mallett back in South African rugby following the announcement that he will take up position as Western Province’s first Director of Rugby. The appointment is one of the wisest to come out of Cape rugby for some time.

That said, however, there are aspects of it that are mildly irritating. This is not a criticism of Mallett, or WP, but of the officials in the national body who have allowed Mallett’s extraordinary rugby brain and depth of experience to slip from their grasp.

Mallett should not be the WP Director of Rugby, he should have been appointed to that position at the South African Rugby Union. If that had been the case, his extensive knowledge could have been tapped by coaches across all levels of the game across the entire country, and not just by those who are based in the Cape.

One of those coaches who could have drawn on Mallett might well have been Springbok coach Jake White. The incumbent of the most difficult job in South African sport had a pretty easy ride of it last year and after guiding the Springbok resurgence he was rightly recognised as the coach of the year.

But White would have to be an extraordinary individual if he was to remain untouched by the weird machinations that make the Bok job so difficult. If you look at the fixture list for the season, and have knowledge of the other potential political pitfalls lurking in the boardroom and which, sooner or later, will bite him as surely as the thunderstorms will roll in over the highveld on a summer afternoon, you can bet your bottom dollar that White is not going to find it plain-sailing forever.

For all White’s success in his first season in charge, he did make mistakes last year, and he even admitted to some of them when his team lost to Ireland and England in consecutive weekends last November. He will make more of those, the media and public scrutiny that he has to live with on a daily basis is not going to get any less.

Given that in South African rugby the officials who make the decision are often the enemy of the national coach, or at least seen as that by the coach himself, it might make the job of the Springbok coach so much easier if he had someone to share the load with, someone who had been there before himself and been bruised by the brickbats.

And what better man than Mallett for that job? Respected wherever the game of rugby union is played on this planet, Mallett has not just achieved success in South Africa, but also overseas. You don’t get granted the freedom of Paris or become an Olympic Ambassador unless there is something special about you, and we all know that South African rugby administration has a dearth of special people.

Of course, had this position been created at national level and Mallett been offered it, he may well have turned them down. He has been messed around enough, and you don’t have to have a very long memory to recall what he thinks about the way the sport is administered in this country.

But if he had been given some freedom to do what he believes is necessary to get South African rugby functioning properly on the playing fields across all levels, he may well have taken the job, for this is a subject he has great passion for.

The problem though for the administrators is an easy one to spot. Mallett, to put it simply, is too much of a hot potato in that he is an independent thinker and outspoken speaker, and he does not tend towards the obsequious sycophancy that is often required if you are to survive in the South African rugby structure.

Those who have read this column for a while will know that Mallett was regarded as the obvious choice to take over as Springbok coach when Rudolf Straeuli was sacked in 2003 (and despite everything that was achieved last year, I would still go with that). Jake White became the preferred option only when it became clear that the administration were not going to include Mallett on their shortlist and when it became apparent that most of those who were on the shortlist just lacked the experience necessary for the job.

Sources at the first meeting where the coaching issue was discussed tell me that mention of Mallett’s name drew a stony silence and what almost amounted to a rebuke to the officials that were prepared, tentatively at that stage, to champion the Mallett cause.

Later in the year the Sarfu president Brian van Rooyen spoke about including Mallett in the SA Rugby structures. He said through the media that he wanted to draw on Mallett’s experience and knowledge. But when I spoke to Mallett as late as last November during the overseas tour, the former Bok coach had still not so much as met or spoken to Van Rooyen.

If you consider how desperately short of really good coaches South African rugby is, this antipathy towards Mallett is ridiculous. It has always amazed me how even those players that found themselves on the wrong side of the coach during the Mallett era now, when asked for an opinion, invariably list him as the best and most gifted coach they worked with.

So why can’t the administrators put aside past differences and see the reality? But then it is not surprising because historically the process used for the selection and appointment of rugby coaches in this country has come close to matching the incompetence of the selection of the national cricket team over the past few months (my hunch is that these people all learn things from one another!).

Mallett’s appointment to the Bok coaching job way back in 1997 could be a case in point. Carel du Plessis, the man he replaced, had not even coached a first league club team. And it is ironic that Mallett is now returning to South African rugby through a top position with WP.

He should have been the first choice of the Cape union at the end of the Alan Zondagh era back in 1996. After breathing life into the struggling False Bay club following his first successful stint as a coach in France, he had proved his capabilities by dragging the unfashionable Boland into Currie Cup contention.

But when he should have been a contender for a job that he really coveted, he was shunned by the union to the point that a top WP official studiously ignored him when Mallett attempted to greet him when they both happened to be browsing through a book shop near Newlands. He ended up becoming a Springbok coach before he had coached WP.

Nearly nine years later Mallett is finally getting to work for the union that he represented as a player. It seems that at WP the penny has long since dropped – rugby success depends on ability and has nothing to do with whether a personality is similar to your own. What a pity they still have to figure that one out at national level.