Scots drummed home important message

The scene outside the Springbok team hotel on the Durban beachfront on Saturday night expelled at least one myth: Our rugby players definitely do read the newspapers.

There they were, at 8pm on a Saturday night, piling around the unfortunate vendor trying to get a peak at what Sunday Tribune correspondent Mike Greenaway had to say about their performance against Scotland.

Unfortunately Greenaway tells me his story was cut to fit a space on the back-page. So it did not include all the venom he transmitted through his fingers onto his laptop keys in the immediate aftermath of the narrow win over Scotland.

But even the "watered-down" version said enough to put several of those Boks into a bad mood as they headed out for their Saturday night's entertainment.

Those officials at SA Rugby (Pty) Ltd who are continually imploring the media to be positive would also not have liked references to the Boks as "a sad and sorry bunch".

Yet, from what I hear, the media summation was a great deal tamer than what coach Rudolf Straeuli had to say to his sorry troops afterwards.

Indeed, the word is that Straeuli and the management were quite amazed at how tamely the assembled media treated them at the post-match press conference.

My explanation for this is that after the disastrous last overseas tour we have all become a little desensitized to Springbok calamity and are a little loath to ask questions which will elicit answers we cannot take seriously.

If the forthright Straeuli had not had his say to the players, they should have picked up the message from the Absa Stadium crowd.

Percy Montgomery once copped it from the Loftus faithful as an individual, but in my memory that was the first time in a home match that a Bok team was booed as a collective.

The time for excuses was over a long time ago and if there are rugby officials who believe we media people are somehow being disloyal in pointing out the Bok shortcomings then they must also think we have the word dimwit printed across our foreheads.

A short while ago I was on the brink of starting to believe the myth that the Press was somehow to blame for the low image of the Boks but a stroll through the famous King's Park braai park on Saturday night revealed that thinking for the insult to the public that it clearly is.

The general public, at least those who bothered to go to the Durban test, DO know their rugby and for the media to try and argue that the R250 they paid for a ticket was money well spent would be an insult to their intelligence.

And as I have no pretence to being modern rugby's version of Josef Goebbels, I will not even attempt to pull the wool over the eyes over those poor sods who went to Absa Stadium expecting to be entertained.

The bottom line, however, is that the Boks can get good press and they can get the media and the public behind them. All it requires is for them to start producing the rugby they are paid to produce.

If you add their win bonus to the basic they get for just running on to the field, each Bok in the starting team earned not that much less than R100 000 for their efforts against the Scots. Try and tell me that what they dished up was worth that sort of payment!

But while all this sounds negative, I will not now disappoint those readers who believe I am building a reputation for seeing some light in even the darkest hour.

There was something to be positive about on Saturday night and it could result in a gigantic step forward for the Springboks.

The ray of light referred to is the way the Scots took just 40 minutes to expose as complete rubbish all the talk of South Africa needing to switch towards a conservative, supposedly "traditional" game.

The Boks won a lot of ball in the first half and that which was not squandered through inept handling was kicked away by flyhalf Louis Koen, who is no more convincing now as an international pivot than when Nick Mallett first tried him and then promptly dropped him.

Koen might be one of the most likeable fellows on the rugby circuit, but he is not the answer for South Africa. Neither is the predictable game-plan which the Scots found so easy to defend against despite the dominance of the Bok forwards.

I have always had a problem with the view that the Bok gameplan should be based on the strategy which earned a team sixth place in the Super 12, and while the Bulls forwards are impressive the brutal truth is that as a team they were really no better than mediocre.

You do not win the World Cup with a team that came sixth in the Super 12, just as it makes absolutely no sense to tackle your big game of the year against England with a game-plan that those opponents (England) patented 10 years ago and then spent the bulk of the next decade trying to discard.

Has anyone supporting the "let's go the conservative route" lobby noticed how every other team on the planet, noting that the World Cup will be played in the southern hemisphere and not on a Scottish swamp, is trying to go in the opposite direction.

They say South Africa does not really have the backs to play the expansive game but then a similar thing was said about the Scots, who easily carved up the Boks out wide on Saturday.

The Scots were the team that played all the rugby and there was not a man, woman or child encountered on the outerfields afterwards who disagreed with my own view that they deserved to win. Because they played the more attractive rugby, there was a lot of sympathy for them.

It is true that the Boks started out on a more adventurous route in last year's Tri-Nations and still finished last, but let's not forget the huge uplift in support that accompanied their exciting brand of rugby. How many people at the time were heard to utter the words: "It does not matter so much if they lose when they play like that."?

I reiterate the view expressed in last week's column. Running every single ball to the wing is as predictable as kicking every ball away and maybe there were times last year when the Boks were a little too cavalier.

But unless the venue for the World Cup is suddenly switched from Australia to some Irish bog, it makes no sense to think that an international competition featuring the top test nations can be won by a team that only plays with its forwards.

That is particularly so when there is absolutely no gaurantee that those forwards will match, let alone dominate, the England pack that they will run into in Perth on October 18.