Peas in a pod…or not

It should be of concern to South African rugby that there could be a perception after Friday’s announcement of the new Springbok coach that they did not get the man they wanted.

And it should be of even greater concern to the office bearers at the South African Rugby Union that even their supposed second choice is understood to have required some brow beating and persuasion before eventually agreeing to do the job.

The Springbok coaching position should be one of the most coveted and sought after jobs in world rugby. But with Heyneke Meyer initially ruling himself out before being persuaded to put his name into the hat in December, and even then having to think long and hard before turning his back on the Bulls, and first choice Gert Smal understood to have opted to stay in Ireland rather than resist the overtures made by his former employers, it might not be an exaggeration to suggest it’s the job no-one wants.

It would be interesting to speculate on what would have happened had Meyer opted to turn down the position. Would Saru then have been forced to reappoint Peter de Villiers, who up to now is the only coach to have used a public forum to emphatically say he would like to do the job?

But we don’t have to speculate for it looks like Meyer is set to be announced as the new coach on Friday, thus righting the injustice that was done to him in 2008, when his achievement of being the first South African coach to engineer a Super Rugby triumph and his years of success at the Bulls were overlooked in the quest to break the mould of Springbok coaches.

By appointing De Villiers the Saru chiefs broke that mould, and whatever you want to say about the soon to be ex-coach, he was very different from his predecessors. While the Springboks did not win the World Cup under him, he did appear to make the team appear more accessible to all the people of the country.

He won’t be remembered as a successful coach, but looking at the bigger picture, and accepting that South Africa has never been a normal country and still isn’t, his appointment might have been a necessary growing pain for our rugby.

Even his most acerbic critics would probably have to admit to amazement if they spent any time alone with De Villiers, as I did towards the latter part of his tenure.

“Mr De Villiers, Mr De Villiers, please can I have an autograph”, “Mr De Villiers, can I have a photograph with you please?” Indian waiters at a hotel in Umhlanga Rocks, security guards at a garage in Paarl, car guards in Port Elizabeth, elderly ladies in coffee shops, young mothers with kids walking down the street, newspaper vendors at traffic lights…they all fawned over De Villiers and gave him a status I did not notice when in the company of previous Bok coaches.

But while having De Villiers as the face of the team would have won the Boks new supporters from the sections of the population where they may have struggled for support previously, the Bok coach’s primary role is to coach the team to win. And in opting for Smal and Meyer as their primary candidates Saru made it clear where the emphasis will be from now.

Smal and Meyer are very much a return to the old mould, and in terms of their capacity to be colourful in their speech and prone to uttering the controversial statements which both anger and entertain, they are as different to De Villiers as Krakow is to Cape Town. Solid, earnest and dependable would doubtless be good ways of describing both, and compared to where we have just been, some would say that adds up to boring.

Yet while they appear to be two peas in a pod, that is not the case. Although Smal would make a strong Bok coach, as was argued in this column as long ago as early November, Meyer is the more dynamic, the one more likely to think out of the box and do something innovative and new.

In his time with the Bulls he was a trail-blazer in many different areas of rugby, not the least of them conditioning, and in the past I have lumped him together with Rassie Erasmus and Brendan Venter as being part of this country’s elite level of intellectual coaches.

All three of those guys have proven experience of building winning teams out of almost nothing, and Meyer’s absence from the coal-face of top level hands on coaching since 2008 was the only reservation anyone could have had over his ability to do the job.

If that concern proves irrelevant, Meyer has the rugby intellect to propel Bok rugby through that much spoken of “next step” that will enable the Boks to become more consistent challengers to the All Black right to be recognised as the world’s most dominant international team.