There is hope for Boks

Port Elizabeth was an awfully negative place on Saturday night and rightfully so. Once the relief had died down following the Louis Koen penalty which saved the Springbok bacon, a pall of gloom quickly descended once more on Telkom Park and the areas around the stadium.

If we have to scratch through against Argentina at home, what is going to happen against New Zealand and Australia away? If we cannot defend properly against Scotland and the Pumas, what will the potent counter-attacking forces of the Wallabies and the All Blacks do to us?

I agree with all the sentiments expressed, but will add one or two, such as questioning how Rudolf Straeuli can possibly even consider taking on the world with the backline configuration he had playing for him on Saturday, or for that matter the one that played in the first test against the Scots in Durban.

Taken at face value, there is a lot wrong with the Springbok game right now. Straeuli is only proving adept at the art of understatement when he says, as he did at the post-match press conference, that there is a lot of work to do in the fortnight which remains before the Tri-Nations kick-off.

The only positive thing that could be said about the Boks at Telkom Park was that they did somehow conspire to win in the end - and the Argentinians will not be playing in the Tri-Nations.

If they were, maybe the Boks would end up in a new position on the log table, in other words fourth instead of third. Certainly on Saturday's evidence you would have to say Argentina are better placed to win the World Cup than South Africa are.

Yet for all those negatives, I cannot find myself agreeing totally with those who say that the Springboks are in complete disarray and have absolutely no chance in the World Cup. I have watched too much rugby to think that, and the Boks, as we all know, have emerged live and kicking from the doors of the rugby mortuary before.

Those who think the Boks who played the Pumas this past weekend were any worse than the ones that struggled against Spain and Uruguay in the 1999 World Cup are suffering from poor memory. If they awaken that memory, they will recall that the following week it was a very different Bok team that took the field in Paris to thrash England in the quarterfinal.

It may sound like someone desperately trying to clutch at straws, but it is a fact that the Boks have historically, at least in the post-isolation era, tended to struggle in matches against teams they should beat.

And let's not make the mistake of lumping Argentina alongside Scotland here. One of the reasons I cannot make a national calamity out of a narrow win over the Pumas is because before the match I wrote the visitors up as a side that could well beat the South Africans on their home soil. Others did too, and with good reason.

These Pumas are not the easy touches they once were (in fact, has everyone forgotten how a supposedly good Bok team lost to the Jaguars in Bloemfontein in 1982?), and their series win over France proved that. Yes, they were playing away this time, yes; they had flown out during the week of the match; yes, the dice was loaded heavily against them.

But there were also factors mitigating against South Africa. For a start they made eight changes for the game, and some players, such as Corne Krige and Quinton Davids, were playing their first match in well over two months.

Combinations were new to each other and like France, we still seem to be in a phase of the season where the coach is testing the depth of his squad rather than fielding his chosen side. A lot of changes can still be made to the Bok team that will transform it into a vastly different unit. This was a horses for courses selection, but it will just require a few tweaks in selection to transform the mainly conservative, predictable team that played on Saturday into one that can start scoring tries again.

We already saw towards the end of the Port Elizabeth game the difference that just the addition of Bob Skinstad and Brent Russell can make to the Bok team. Add Joe van Niekerk and Werner Greeff later on, and let me not deny it, I WOULD play Robbie Fleck at inside centre, and suddenly you have the makings of a dynamic side that can both win ball and run with it.

This may have been mentioned in this column before, but seeing it was Argentina that the Boks played against at the weekend, maybe it bears repeating: In 1980 Morne du Plessis' Springboks battled as much against the South American Jaguars as these Boks did. They only made sure of the second test win when Gysie Pienaar replaced Pierre Edwards at fullback, so injecting much needed flair.

The move prompted a change in approach for the series against the Lions, which the Boks won with an exciting brand of rugby. Who says history cannot repeat itself? Yes, I hear the objections that the teams were more settled then and that Straeuli is not giving his men time to settle down. But that will come. The objective this year is the World Cup, and asides from the four official test matches that remain, there are two warm-up games and about a month and a half of camp time, where the Boks will get a chance to sort themselves out.

Now let me admit that there is another reason why I am more upbeat than your average Springbok fan. It is based around my position as a journalist, which allows me greater interaction with both the Boks and the management than most people out there.

This may confound you, but one of the few people who does not appear genuinely shattered at the Bok performances is coach Rudolf Straeuli. He may be a little overly defensive at press conferences, but he does genuinely appear to think he has a plan and unlike his immediate predecessor in the hot-seat, he does not look like one who wants to jump out of the kitchen.

Straeuli has consistently said he knows who his top players are and he knows what game he wants to play. That has not wavered during the series of narrow victories against relatively mediocre opposition.

During the past few months I have heard about some of the plans that are being hatched. I think I have a reasonable idea of what the team might look like in two months time as one by one, in a systematic fashion, Straeuli's chosen men come back and the game-plan starts to take shape.

One of the reasons I am not about to condemn the Boks as a complete walking disaster who have absolutely no chance of winning anything worthwhile this year is because the results of the early tests have not exactly surprised me.

As long ago as March members of the management team were warning me not to expect too much from these games. The line went something to the effect that the first few weeks would be a feeling in period, that the top players would not play, that Straeuli intended to use a step by step process to get to a World Cup which is played in October, not June.

Last week I had a conversation with Corne Krige, the first in a while. Far from being despondent (and with him I would pick it up if he was), he seems genuinely encouraged by what he and several other top players went through during the rehabilitation camp in Cape Town.

It is there that much of the ground-work for World Cup success is being done. The winning of these tests has always been important, but the manner of those victories was less so.

Krige himself told me that he and his teammates dream about the day that the Bok team suddenly clicks, as all good teams do, but he warned me that it would definitely not happen at Telkom Park. "It is much too early, we are still a long way from being ready to do that. But it will come, hopefully sometime towards the end of the Tri-Nations," said Krige.

There you have it - even before the game Krige was not saying that his Boks would lick the Pumas. He did say the forwards would smash their forwards, which they didn't quite do, but they didn't perform that badly against the feared Puma unit either. The first 20 minutes of Saturday's game were actually quite impressive, and if you take away all recollection of what happened between then and the last 10 minutes, there is something for the Boks to build on.

If you look back at previous World Cups, and what the teams that failed were doing four months out from the event, then maybe we should be thanking our lucky stars that the Boks did not turn in a commanding 80 minute performance on Saturday. History shows that the team that wins the World Cup is the one that peaks in the semi-final and final, not at the start of their buildup.

At the moment the defence is all over the place, the players cannot catch a ball, and I am as confused as anyone else about where Straeuli is going to find a couple of decent wings with the pace to round off a backline attack. In a nutshell, don't go out and bet your house on the Boks just yet. But it would also be too early to bet against them.