Struggling to face the truth

If the situation wasn't so sad it would be hard not to laugh at the irony of hearing that the South African Rugby Football Union is considering action against Corne Krige for 'bringing the game into disrepute'.

Most followers of South African rugby will agree the game has been brought into disrepute, but it is not the Springbok players or their former captain who has done so.

For the record, the action being considered against Krige centres on his comment in a newspaper column last week that Arthob Petersen, the head of the Sarfu coaching assessment committee, did not know a good coach from a bad one.

Here is some news for the people at Sarfu who have been so mortally offended - Krige is only saying what most players, coaches and other people close to rugby have been saying in private.

This is not a personal attack on Petersen, who does not stand alone, but at the composition of the committee as a whole.

Ian McIntosh was the only person on the committee who even remotely achieved enough top level coaching success to have the right to choose the new Springbok coach.

There are many who would now be thinking to themselves "Well, Krige wasn't exactly a successful captain". But it is not the Springbok captain who chooses the coach, and it is the coach who has the most influence on how the national team plays the game.

Krige did not choose Rudolf Straeuli as his coach, he was lumped with him. Along with many others, I was irritated when the captain kept defending Straeuli during last year's World Cup and kept sprouting all that garbage about the Boks being mentally tough.

But it would have led to a controversy to make the others pale by comparison if Krige had stood up at a press conference overseas and said: "The reason we are losing is because we don't have a coach who knows how to select a team."

Brian van Rooyen says the players should not get national contracts because they did not perform at last year's World Cup. Yet was it the fault of the players that they were never allowed to settle as a team?

The number of changes that were made on an almost weekly basis was covered enough last year. Suffice to say however that the poor centre who kept getting lumped with a different midfield partner every week, and who was forced to play outside Louis Koen every week, hardly had much chance of delivering his best.

Neither was it the players who opted to go to 'Kamp Staaldraad' or who believed they should be running to the point of exhaustion in the weeks building up to important test matches.

Under the last few Bok coaches the players have very little power in the team set-up. As AJ Venter and a few others discovered, standing up to the coach can be tantamount to kissing your Bok career goodbye.

By all accounts there was a culture of fear in the Springbok team last season, and this explains why some of Krige's comments in his last months as captain saw him lose the respect of many.

But it is also clear why Krige is choosing now to speak out. It is because he is no longer Bok captain and feels he is duty bound now to speak on behalf of those who cannot. It took Will Carling's comments about old farts to inspire change in England, maybe it is time someone said something similar here.

If players have no confidence in the administrators, who can really blame them? For the record, Krige was the "senior player" who told me at the end of Nick Mallett's reign as Bok coach that his sacking would lead to "complete chaos". They turned out to be prophetic words.

Since Mallett was relieved of his position for talking out about ticket prices, the Springboks have plumed the depths. It is not hard to see why, either, for the administrators who now accuse Krige of bringing the game into disrepute replaced Mallett with a coach in Harry Viljoen who had walked out on every major job he had held in rugby because he could not handle the pressure.

They then went to a coach in Straeuli who had several question marks over his ability after two successive Currie Cup finals in which he had been comprehensively out-thought and out-strategised by his Western Province counterpart Gert Smal.

Krige is hardly saying something the rest of us didn't know when he says, as he did in his column in Die Burger, that the process used to find the new coach was "a mess" and chaotic.

A few weeks ago I ran a column listing the many things that Van Rooyen had promised during an interview building up to the Sarfu election. On almost every one there was a dramatic about turn post-election. Add to that now his promise that players would be consulted on the matters relating to their future and their welfare.

By all accounts that has not happened and even when it came to appointing the Bok coach there was no more than a pretence at consultation.

May I strongly advise the new Sarfu president that the next time he calls for a bosberaad it should not include just South African rugby's incompetent blazer brigade but the people on whose toil their own success depends.

For those who would argue now that Van Rooyen is right and it is the players to blame for everything I have a question: Why is it that players from this country go overseas and shine in foreign leagues?

Watching Jaco van der Westhuyzen play a premiership game the other day it was hard to believe it was the same player. What was noteworthy was that he was playing a position, flyhalf, where he had been dispensed with back home.

It is a similar story with former WP player Dan Vickerman. The new Waratahs signing was good but hardly an immense star of the future when he started his career in South Africa.

He was certainly behind Hottie Louw in terms of ability, which begs the question: How good would Hottie Louw have been had he gone to Australia and been exposed to the Australian coaching structures?

White was raving at the weekend about the condition of Clyde Rathbone. But Rathbone did not get like that because he is necessarily different to other South African players. He is well conditioned because he has been exposed to Australian professionalism.

There are still some in Durban who are upset that Kearsney old boy Matt Stevens, who recently played for England against the NZ Barbarians and highly rated by Sir Clive Woodward, was allowed to slip the net.

But would he, or Stuart Abbott for that matter, have been as good as he is now if he had remained in South Africa? Probably not - both Abbott and himself needed a properly organised coaching structure, specialised tuition, not to mention the security which comes with the highly professionalised structure in England, to get them to where they are. Those of course are things which we have a lack of in this country.

Once they are working in countries where the game is run professionally, South Africa's expat player community has shown that players from this country are not afraid of hard work. They have also shown there is plenty of ability in this country.

So whose fault is it that the Springboks have failed so abysmally in the past few years? Yes, the finger points at the people who sacked Nick Mallett, the same ones now wanting to censure Krige for bringing the game into disrepute.