Time to stop the denial

If the Springboks are going to be in with any chance of retaining the World Cup next year, the current trend of living in denial is going to have to be brought to an immediate halt.

When the team was in Australasia, four yellow cards in three matches was not considered enough reason to believe the team had a discipline problem. The Boks lost all three matches overseas by double figure margins, and yet when the Springbok coach was asked about it, he never came out with any kind of comment suggesting he acknowledged that there was a problem much less had any idea of how to fix it.

“When I watch the game again on video I cannot understand how we lost”, was not confidence inspiring stuff.

When the Boks returned home all we heard from the coach and his assistants was that there were small things that had gone wrong on tour and that no radical change of approach was necessary. All it required, or so they said, was a few minor adjustments and that it was complacency that had tripped the team up in the away matches against New Zealand and Australia.

Then on Saturday, after a heart-breaking defeat at an FNB Stadium filled to the brim with 94 000 passionate South Africans hostile to the All Blacks, when we should have been hoping for some cogent statement relating to how the Boks would rectify their losing streak, we just got more mind-boggling denial.

“This match proved that this team has the ability to beat any other team at any venue on any given day,” said De Villiers.

The most obvious problem with that statement is that the Boks did not win the match. And while they were brave and passionate, there should not have been any denying that the All Blacks were the better team.

The second problem is that even if the Boks had won the match, playing in front of nearly 100 000 home supporters at altitude would hardly have been evidence that they could win “anywhere”. It was the typical South African gutsy bloody-mindedness that made the Boks competitive, no more than that.

Running the All Blacks close when so many external factors were in their favour told us nothing about the Bok ability to challenge strongly for the World Cup on New Zealand soil next year. On the contrary, losing a match on home soil which it was so imperative to win told us the opposite.

What the public needs to hear from the coaches is that they have identified the problem, not that the Boks might be able to beat any team on a given day when the ball bounces for them. Surely that is a given, and as I wrote when the Boks struggled against Scotland in Edinbugh a few years ago, this is not Romania we are living in.

The Super 14 showed us that this country has plenty of rugby depth, and as one of the perennial top two rugby nations in the world, the Boks should always stand a chance no matter who they are playing against and where they are playing.

To deny that New Zealand have left South Africa behind and that some kind of dramatic innovation is necessary will only see the Boks fall further behind than they already have. The denial coming out of the Bok management is all too reminiscent of the Rudolf Straeuli era, when brave defeats were celebrated as a sign that maybe the Boks would be competitive at the next World Cup and we were assured that there was a grand plan.

Sorry, but if all that leaden-footed walking by the Boks in the last 25 minutes against the All Blacks was part of a plan, it wasn’t much of a plan. Denying that the Boks, and certain players, are unfit, is also disingenuous when the evidence presented to us on match-day is so obvious.

The assertions last week by the Bok conditioning coach that John Smit is as fit now as in 2007 was glibly accepted by most media, but such assertions are meaningless when they are not backed up by the statistics and evidence.

There is an elephant in the room situation developing, and has been for a while, in that we have a problem that many can see but everyone appears too scared to talk about. And no, I am not referring just to the question mark hanging over John Smit’s future, but also the one that focuses on the current coaching staff’s suitability to the task of guiding the world’s most talent-wealthy rugby nation.

Since last year’s Tri-Nations the Boks have won just five in 11 test matches, and three of those wins were against Italy. Selection errors and tactical blunders have blighted the national team almost constantly during that time.

The time is long overdue for some honesty, straight talking and some big, brave decisions. If SA rugby muddles on like this for another year, 2011 could well turn out to be another 2003. Considering the talent available, that would be both sad and unnecessary.