Put away the shot-gun

It was a weird feeling hanging around the ABSA Stadium outer-fields on the Saturday night after the first test match between the Springboks and the British and Irish Lions.

If you consider the long, and probably completely over-hyped, build-up to the series, you would have anticipated most South African supporters being over the moon at their team’s victory. Instead there was a muted response, with many fans talking in tones of frustration that would not have been misplaced had the Boks lost the game.

There are reasons for this. Firstly, it quickly became obvious in the first half of the Durban game that these Lions are not nearly as good as we thought they might be. British rugby has been in trouble since England rocked the world in 2003, and the Boks, in the first 55 minutes, just reminded everyone watching that southern hemisphere players have a telling advantage in strength and physicality.

Remember too that the Lions had the shortest ever build-up to the test series in the history of Lions tours, and ultimately they are a composite team. They need time to mould together as a unit, and lack of time meant the team that played in Durban was effectively playing together for the first time.

The pre-series predictions that the low key provincial matches might have hindered the Lions more than helped them were also to prove horribly prophetic as Durban proved that their combinations had never been subjected to a proper examination.

So the Boks had a telling advantage, and you got the impression that most fans expected this to be the case. The tour might be being marketed as some kind of world championship, but the knowledgeable rugby fan knows that the real test of Springbok prowess this year will come in the Tri-Nations season.

Losing to the Lions would be a disaster, as it was in 1974 and 1997, but victory against the Lions should be expected. After all, they have only won four test series in their history.

The coach conspired against the Boks in 1997, and it was the perception that Peter de Villiers had almost done the same again in Durban that led to so many long faces on Saturday night. My own view has always been that the Boks should win the series easily, that they would only lose if once again they conspire against themselves, so the general mood was one I could easily understand.

It is hardly a secret any more that the senior players run the Springbok team. And rightly so if you consider the success they have enjoyed, and the Super 14 and World Cup medals held by some key members of the side.

The Boks were playing their rugby in the first half against the Lions, the rugby those who know what the players prefer expected them to play. However, it was noticeable after Saturday’s game that people who know Bok assistant coach Dick Muir were expecting a different kind of approach.

Muir had explained the omission of Stefan Terblanche from the Bok squad by saying that he did not fit the mould of fullback the management were looking for. He told fellow journalists that JP Pietersen was the preferred choice because he would suit a policy of all-out attack.

Muir was also quite out-spoken during the Super 14 season in his view that the Sharks were being too conservative. He was frustrated with their kick and chase tactics. But what did the Boks do on Saturday? Their style was almost an exact replica of that adopted by the Sharks and the Bulls in the Super 14 - and Terblanche would have fitted in perfectly had he been selected.

In other words, the boot dominated, and rightly so, for the All Blacks showed us earlier in the day that a return to the basic tenets of test match rugby brings the desired result.

One can imagine that even though the Boks were so dominant in the first half, Muir, with his love for running the ball, must have been tearing his hair out at half-time at the approach that had been adopted. And maybe also De Villiers, who must only be too aware that with the exception of his selection of Adrian Jacobs and a Zimbabwean who was not previously available, the team he is coaching is the one that Jake White built – and they are playing his rugby.

Perhaps this was why De Villiers came up with the quite bizarre explanation for his substitutions on Saturday that the Boks were not controlling the game, were looking flat, and needed an injection of pace and energy.

The fact is the Boks were controlling the game – in the time honoured tradition of test match rugby. And De Villiers should have been happy for that, for as he said a few weeks ago, the players make him look good.

Last year we saw a disturbing sequence coming to the fore. It started in the first test series against Wales, where the tourists were buried by a structured, suffocation approach in De Villiers’ first test in charge, but then in the second, at Loftus, they tried to run the ball from all over the place, and nearly came unstuck. There was a similar switch between Dunedin and Perth, and it cost the South Africans the Tri-Nations trophy that should have been theirs.

Robbie Deans is right, the Springboks are the best team in the world at the moment. They undeniably have the best players. But those players need to be allowed to play it the way they obviously like playing it, and the 12-bore shot-gun that keeps getting aimed at their feet by a coaching staff which may have expectations that go beyond just winning should be put away for good.