Pick the curate's egg at fullback

You could almost hear the collective gnashing of teeth on Friday morning of a nation which must by now be wondering whether there is a sporting deity out there somewhere that we have well and trully hacked off.

Coming at the end of a week where our cricket team was dumped out of the World Cup by the rain guards, the televised showing of the Super 12 games featuring the Bulls and the Stormers just delivered more frustration.

Like it was for the John Cleese character in the 1980s comedy movie, Clockwise, the frustration is caused more by the hope that keeps springing up and then is so cruelly dashed than by the fact that we just are not good enough.

If every game was like the England annihilation of the Springboks at Twickenham last year, maybe we would all just accept it and respond by not taking it all so seriously.

But we do keep receiving these crumbs of hope, these glimpses of what it might be like if only we could get a fair referee or benefit for once from the bounce of the ball, rather than see the rub of the green always go in the opposite direction.

The Bulls could rightly complain about referee Stuart Dickinson's role in their first half demise against the Highlanders in Invercargill. As Joost put it afterwards, maybe the Bulls were just playing to different rules in the first half, for in the second half they were not so harshly punished and ended up scoring three tries without reply against a very good Highlanders unit.

Of course, we never can tell after a game like this whether the Bulls' comeback was all their own doing, or whether the Highlanders, once they were out of range, just stopped applying downward pressure on the accelerator.

But there was enough in that second half to have us success starved South Africans lamenting the first half display and wondering if with perhaps a bit of luck the result would have been different.

For the Stormers, there can be no complaints about the referee. Australian Peter Marshall awarded 16 penalties to the Stormers against just six, a rare advantage for a South African team travelling Down Under.

But it is the fact that this advantage in the penalty count accurately reflected the pressure the Stormers exerted in most facets of play that irks us. With all that good, clean possession and the territorial advantage they enjoyed, how was it possible that the Stormers conspired to lose the game? Not just lose it mind, but go down by 15 points.

There are good rugby reasons, such as lack of finishing and concentration lapses which led to missed tackles, but if you recall that there once was a time that the Stormers and Western Province expected to win matches even when forced to survive on scraps, it does seem that maybe the gods are just angry at us South Africans.

There again, maybe part of the problem lies in the number of players carrying the country's flag who feel exactly as we do. The feeling of being bouyed with the hope of a new dawn, as the Stormers were just two weeks ago, only to see it dashed once more by outrageous fortune, is shared by several of the players.

One of those is a player who has seen more new beginnings, second chances and new dawns than any other - the Stormers flyhalf, Gaffie du Toit.

To say that the Stormers lost to the Hurricanes because of Du Toit would be unfair. Du Toit's performance was more curate's egg than just plain abysmal. There was the occasional useful touch finder and there were several occasions when he did well in helping the Stormers set up the ball at the breakdown.

But it is decision making that is the most important feature of a flyhalf's game, and here it has to be said that Du Toit is so poor that he is almost non-existent. It was not the missed kicks which hurt most, although they were crucial, but the hesitant way that Du Toit played.

A little more assertiveness will go a long way towards turning Du Toit into the player that most of us believe he should be, but he is now running out of time and second chances. If Carel du Plessis gives up on Du Toit, there are not too many other places he can go.

Perhaps he knows that, and it just makes him more tense, more nervous, and this impacts disastrously on his game.

You get the feeling when you see Du Toit line up an early kickable penalty that he has the same thoughts going through his mind as most long-suffering South African sports fans - here we go again. Maybe Du Toit considers himself to be a duffer, which is why he so frequently becomes one.

One of the Springboks once told me a story about Du Toit's reaction after he had scored a brilliant try for the Bok tourists against Wales A in Cardiff a few years ago. Instead of celebrating his score, Du Toit, realising that he faced a crucial conversion which would put SA out of range in a close game, threw the ball to Dan van Zyl and told him to take the kick as "I'll probably miss it".

Others tell of how his hands shake with nervous tension as he prepares to take each kick. You can almost see it happening from the side. When Du Toit messes up, it gets to him more than most, perhaps because he knows what the reaction will be.

So what do the Stormers do about their new acquisition from Natal. Do they throw him away?

Considering how often he has duffed it, there will be many answering in the affirmative. Certainly if you look at the number of games that Du Toit's teams have won when he is at flyhalf, then there seems little other option.

But note the qualification - games that Du Toit's team won when he was at flyhalf. His record at fullback is infinitely better, which begs the question - why does he not stick to the No15 jersey, where he may have a better chance of prolonging his rugby career?

As long ago as the 2000 season Du Toit asked the then Sharks coach Hugh Reece-Edwards if he could be considered soley as a fullback in future. Reece-Edwards gave him his wish and, with more time and space at his disposal, Du Toit settled into the position quite well.

But no sooner had he run into form than he was ruled out through injury, and by the time he returned, people had forgotten that he was a useful fullback. Instead of fighting it out with Ricardo Loubscher for a place in the last line of defence, Du Toit found himself at the start of the Kevin Putt era at the Sharks competing with Herkie Kruger for the right to wear the No10 jersey.

Du Toit has the pace and the hand skills, not to mention the kicking game, to make a success of fullback. So let's not keep banging heads against walls in the forlorn hope that Du Toit, like South African sport, will come right if you give him enough chances.

Success comes through change, and it is time for Gaffie du Toit to be reinvented as a player who wears only one number on his back - and that is No15.