Professional game demands a professional approach

The dearth of live rugby recently has been made up for by the plethora of past matches rerun during the off-season on television.

The sight of Carel du Plessis and Danie Gerber running all over John Scott's England, the New Zealand Cavaliers and whatever other team cared to visit during the 1980s should certainly have sparked the odd sarcastic or cynical comment from South Africans fresh from seeing the roles reversed at Twickenham less than two months ago.

But what always strikes me about these recordings of past matches is how dramatically the game has changed. The game as it is played now, with its new rugby league incarnation, is scarcely recognisable from the rugby union code as it was in the 1980s, let alone the 1970s and 1960s.

Considering how many of the players of that era have big opinions about the modern game, I found the matches played in the late 1960s and '70s particularly intriguing - although amusing might be a better word for it.

Old timers will have to forgive me for saying so, but on the televised evidence rugby back then appeared to be a contact version of the schoolboy playground game we knew as gaining grit. The games seemed to consist of endless kicking for position, so much so that one colleague thought one of the matches was an edited highlights package featuring just lineouts.

Some of the forwards did occasionally run with the ball, but mostly it was a case of the big men just contributing in the lineouts and scrums. The rest of the time they spent jogging between the set-pieces.

The point of all of this is not to have a go at yesterday's heroes, who were all great in their particular era and would no doubt have been so today had they been able to draw from modern sports science and were they coached from the outset to play the modern game.

It is more to point out a fact which should be bleeding obvious but is sometimes too easily forgotten - the game was amateur then, but it is a professional sport today.

I make this point because it may go some way to explaining why some of the teams that the Boks used thump are now competing with them and even beating them. It may all come down to the far more radical changes that some of these countries had to effect with the dawning of professionalism.

In the decade before the change, South Africa and to a lesser extent New Zealand was more shamateur in their approach to rugby than amateur. The sport had long ago ceased to be purely amateur and had become quasi-professional.

When the old amateur ethos was swept away in 1995, the South Africans may have seen less reason to make far reaching changes than England. There the sport had traditionally been played mainly by "toffs" who had been through public school and university. For them, winning and losing was less of a life and death struggle than it is now that peoples livelihoods depend on it.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand how the greater importance attached to winning, and the greater amount of time that full-time players and coaches are able to devote to the game, leads to a raise in standards.

And you don't have to be a particularly regular reader of rugby related media to know that northern hemisphere countries have made a concerted effort since 1995 to buy into southern hemisphere secrets and close the gap on their rivals.

A couple of years ago there was still a big difference between southern and northern teams when it came to physique and physical strength. As recently as 1997 a French captain called for greater contact with the southern hemisphere powers so that northern players could be exposed to the superior fitness and strength of the Antipodean and South African games.

England went about the task of closing the gap by professionalising their structures.

While the economic side of the pro game was not neglected, great importance was placed on coaching. By that I do not refer to just Clive Woodward, but to the coaching structure which was designed to uplift the overall standard of the English game.

On my most recent visit to the UK they were advertising for a national rugby co-ordinator who would work with the coaching co-ordinator. I cannot remember off-hand the figures advertised, but it was clearly a lucrative job. Speaking to local officials who have studied the English structure first hand, it appears that country might be in for an extended golden age.

But whereas England and other unions greeted the professional age by going all out to uplift the quality of the way the game was played, you get the distinct impression that South Africa was lulled by the World Cup success of 1995 into believing that old strengths and traditions would suffice.

Instead of appointing national coaching directors and spending money on employing the rugby people necessary to take the playing side of the sport to the next level, the SA rugby bosses splashed out on marketing departments and other economic functionaries designed to maximise profits.

In the past two years the formation of what was initially the Springbok Business Unit has dramatically professionalised the operation. South African rugby now has a full-time sevens coach as well as a full-time under-21 coach.

But if you look at the England model, the degree of specialisation does not go far enough.

There is still no national coaching co-ordinator, a position called for as long ago as 1994 by Ian McIntosh and a call repeated by Nick Mallett and succeeding coaches. Someone whose job will not depend on the Bok results, but on the upliftment of skills across all levels so that the national coach does not have to waste time teaching what should be the basics.

The past few years have shown that Springbok success does not depend on the identity of a national coach who is invariably expected to single-handedly wave a magic wand and turn poorly coached players who at provincial level follow disparate approaches into a world beating team.

In the professional era, South Africa's good years have always been followed by incredibly lean years and not just one top player has left the country decrying the lack of continuity in coaching and coaching approaches.

The time has long since arrived for everyone in South African rugby to recognise that the game post-1995 is a vastly different one to pre-1995 and it poses different demands and new challenges. It demands a change of mindset which may be slowly happening, but not fast enough to keep pace with the United Kingdom, who as long ago as 1997 sent a British Lions squad to this country that included a full-time specialist kicking coach.