Time to change Bok mindset

Commentators and critics, in harping on after the quarterfinal loss about passion and commitment, may be making exactly the same mistake which cost the Springboks their chances of being competitive in this years World Cup.

True, the Boks did not look quite as animated and frenetic against the All Blacks as they had appeared to be against England a few weeks earlier. In that sense, the Melbourne match may have confirmed what I feared after the pool match against England - the Boks had played their final on October 18 in Perth.

But then captain Corne Krige was also correct when he pointed out that it is hard to look passionate when you cannot get your hands on the ball for the first 25 minutes.

No, for me what was glaringly obvious was that what the Boks really lacked in the quarterfinal was not passion, but the necessary skill, organisation and rugby intelligence that is needed if you are to win a modern World Cup.

Ultimately that is where South African rugby is falling down right now - there are too many people who share current coach Rudolf Straeuli's view that good old fashioned "span gees" are the pivotal ingredients required for rugby success at the highest level.

Now don't get me wrong. Passion and commitment are needed. But at international level, when you are being paid big money and a World Cup is at stake, they should be a given. What the coach should be paid to do is to strategise, to innovate, to organise and to find clever ways to get ahead of the opposition.

Sadly, from about a month before the World Cup kicked off, all we ever heard about was mental strength, team unity and self-belief. Oh, I almost forgot the other pearl, fitness, which was something the Boks were made to concentrate intensively on at a stage of the season when they should have been in prime condition following a long Super 12 and Tri-Nations progamme.

These things became a pre-occupation of a management that decided that bush camps, army style physical punishment and other disciplinary strategies were the key to attaining World Cup glory.

I know Krige well enough to regard him a highly intelligent person. But reading some of the comments he made during the World Cup made me sometimes wonder if it was really him talking.

Here were a few quotes that just kept on being repeated over and over again: "I know no-one else at this World Cup has the mental strength we have. I know for a fact none of the other teams have gone through what we have gone through"; "We are the fittest team at the World Cup".

There was never any mention from his mouth, or from anyone else in the management, of any clever ploys that were being dreamed up to get the Boks ahead of their opposition. There was little mention of skills, of innovative game-plans or strategies. Ok, coach Rudolf Straeuli did talk a bit about game-plans, but what he said and what happened on the field, in my view, never really correlated.

For instance, after the England game he said that his team had shown that they could run the ball. Did they perhaps score a few tries in that game that I may have missed? In their two big matches at the World Cup, the only ones against genuine top opposition, they failed to cross the line.

The real problem with Bok rugby was unwittingly highlighted by two former All Black greats in the buildup to the quarterfinal. Both David Kirk, the winning captain at the 1987 World Cup, and former wing Stu Wilson wrote in their newspaper columns that the All Blacks would be too organised and too skilled for the Boks.

Wilson was so convinced that it would be on this basis that the Kiwis would win that he even cockily ended his column by saying that the South Africans should enjoy their flight "because you are going home".

He was right, and it was what I feared from the moment Straeuli started to get excited about what lay in wait for the Boks in their team building sessions before the World Cup.

Guts and tenacity have won South Africa a World Cup before, but almost 10 years later it should have become clear the other nations have become too professional and international rugby teams have become too skilled and organised.

Team spirit, determination and good old-fashioned South African bloody mindedness may have sufficed in the second test against England in 1994. It is most certainly not the path to any long-term run of success.

For that the players need skills and they need intelligence. South African rugby, and this has been argued often enough in this column before, needs to change its way of thinking, move away from the old-fashioned "we are the most physical team in the world" mindset and recognise that you need more than that in the modern era.

The Bok forwards were good up to the All Black game. But the Boks, because of their lack of other options, had to bank everything on forward dominance.

Now how often in the recent past have the Boks dominated the All Black pack? And would the New Zealand record be what it is if they had weak forwards? Dion O'Cuinneagain, the South African who captained Ireland and was coached for a long time by All Black coach John Mitchell, touched on it when I interviewed him during the buildup week.

The Boks would be wrong, he said, if they spent too much time studying the All Black pool games. He added that Mitchell was too clever a coach to keep anything the same for the quarterfinal and he would make the subtle adjustments to the forward approach that would transform them back into a world beating unit when it mattered.

O'Cuinneagain's words were to prove prophetic and the Boks got caned by the All Blacks at forward. Those with memories long enough to recall the final scrums of the Loftus test a few months back will recognise that this was not the first time it had happened, either.

With the forwards being outplayed, there was no ways the Boks were ever going to win. They fell behind and lacked the game-breakers, either in the team or on the bench, who could conceivably have done something if brought on in a last-ditch gamble to turn the game.

Instead of the versatile, forceful and big occasion player Werner Greeff, the Boks had Louis Koen on the bench. What kind of impact substitute would a kicking flyhalf be?

Straeuli summed up his attitude to the man most South Africans would have liked to have seen on the bench, Brent Russell, when he failed to use his opportunity to call him to Australia as a replacement for Joe van Niekerk. So much for any emphasis on flair, which is becoming more and more prominent as a decider of games the longer this World Cup lasts.

It is tempting to blame the players, but was it really Derick Hougaard's fault that this huge match was only his third at international level? And was it Danie Rossouw's fault that he was being built up to be the find of the tournament before facing any opposition of any consequence?

The players played their guts out, they did what they could to stem the tide. The missed tackles may have been as much a result of not being sufficiently prepped on the All Black angles of running as any other factor.

Against a team as skilled, clever and pacy as the All Blacks are, a combination selected and coached to win on motivation and passion will almost always come second.

The Boks, who return home with just one good hour against England to boast about, desperately need an infusion of skill and intelligence if we are not to become a nation that thrives on beating the Samoas of this world. Is Rudolf Straeuli equipped for this task? Emphatically not.