The coach must have final say

There should not be too many problems with the appointment of Andre Markgraaff as the new national selection convenor.

When it comes to credentials for the job, Markgraaff certainly loses nothing to the people who have sat on the panel in recent seasons. While he has not coached in a while, he remains finely attuned with what is happening with regards to what players are coming through. Together with Gerrit Pool, one of the keenest rugby brains in the business, he has unearthed much useful talent on the platteland in recent years.

He is certainly better suited at the moment to the position of chief of selectors than he was to the mooted position of head coach. For that you really need to have been coaching the 15-man game in the past few years, and I have a feeling Markgraaff knows that, which may be why he has been reluctant to make himself available for that position.

But while Markgraaff taking over the position previously filled by Francois Davids is not one I have a problem with, there are questions which need to be asked about the amount of power invested in the position.

National selectors are necessary in that they keep tabs on the form of the top players and they are constantly on the look-out for new players coming through. The national coach cannot possibly be everywhere at once and he does require help in assessing what is available.

But it would be a big mistake to go back to the days when the chief of selectors had the overriding say in who played in the team, so negating the coach's right to be master of his own destiny.

If the coach is going to be hired and fired on the basis of his team's performance, then he must have the main say on the personnel that he uses. Though a national selection convenor can tell him who is playing well and which players are in the best nick in certain positions, ultimately it is the coach who knows how he intends using the players.

For instance Ian McIntosh, when he was coaching the Boks, never once got to use Dick Muir in his midfield. This despite the fact that of all the centres in South Africa at the time, Muir was the best equipped to bring through the direct rugby that Mac had introduced to the national team.

One of the reasons that Muir did not play was because his former Natal coach was not in fact the man doing the overlooking. Hannes Marais, the national selection convenor, was the culprit, and his fall-down was that he did not have the same understanding of Mac's game as Mac himself did.

Ditto for Gary Teichmann, who ironically only ended up finding favour (Kitch Christie did choose him, but only for one test) once Markgraaff had taken over as Bok coach in 1996.

It is because of the type of problems faced by McIntosh, with his seven man selection panel telling him what to do, that some of the coaching candidates on the current Bok shortlist are having second thoughts about making themselves available.

Ultimately the coach knows best what kind of game he wants to play and what kind of players he needs to play that game successfully.

He may often be wrong, and it is for this reason that moves are being made to increase the importance of the selection convenor. Maybe a more powerful selection panel would have prevented Nick Mallett from making his biggest mistake by dropping Gary Teichmann back in 1999, maybe Markgraaff would have come up with a much better World Cup squad than Rudolf Straeuli did (he could hardly fail in this regard).

But it is my opinion that as long as the coach is seen as the fall guy for team performance, it is he who has to have the main say on who plays and who doesn't. Christie won the World Cup in 1995, but would he have done so had he been subservient to a selection chief who might have prevented him from shifting Hennie le Roux to centre?

Deny the coach the right to be the main author and we will end up with the confusion that reigned at the end of the McIntosh era, when critics were left wondering whether he really was the one to blame for his team's failings.