To rest is not the question

Shakespeare’s Hamlet summed up his dilemma when he reached his personal cross-roads by asking the question “To be or not to be”, but for Springbok coach Jake White the quandary may not be as simplistic as “To rest or not to rest”.

What White needs to decide, as a matter of urgency before the serious buildup to the next World Cup starts, is not if the rest should take place, but WHEN the rest should take place. Shakespeare might have spelled out White’s dilemma in a soliloquy that would have begun thus: “The question is not to rest or not to rest, but when to rest – ah, that is the question…”

The New Zealand Rugby Union chief executive Chris Moller has just announced that his organisation will be pulling 22 top All Blacks out of the first half of next year’s Super 14. According to Moller, the players will miss the first seven rounds of the competition to “give the All Blacks the best possible chance of winning the World Cup.”

Moller seemed almost to be quoting Professor Tim Noakes when he added that “Sports science research and our coaches tell us that the players need a continuous window when they can do the necessary physical conditioning work without the rigours of playing top level rugby at the same time.”

However, in the South African context, it is not just Noakes who would say that. Greg Hechter, the Stormers and Western Province conditioning coach, has been telling me the same thing for years. For Hechter, it is imperative that the rugby administrators find a way to give the players three months of continuous rest on an annual basis, as that is the amount of time players need to recover from the previous season and build themselves up for the new one.

Given this knowledge, the Kiwi decision to rest players for half the Super 14 season makes sense. However, White should think twice before blindly following the New Zealand example by calling for exactly the same thing.

Releasing his top players from 50% of their Super 14 commitments might just prove counter-productive to White, and I have a suspicion that he probably knows it.

As it stands, the 24 players on national contracts have already been released from Currie Cup duties this season. This means that after the last Tri-Nations test against Australia on September 9, the top Boks won’t be seeing any action again until the middle of November when they are due to play against Ireland in Dublin.

That is a break of two months, but just recently there have been indications from White, through his public pronouncements and those of his management, that he might now be recognising the perils of having players who aren’t playing enough rugby.

Before the Brisbane test against Australia the management stated, through the assistant coaches, that part of the Bok problem was that several players were just coming back to rugby after being out for a while and thus they were rusty.

White might have found out the hard way that you cannot effectively prepare a player for a test match by putting him on a conditioning programme when he recalled De Wet Barry from a six-week break for the test against France. Barry played like someone who had not played for that long.

The upshot was that White had to go to the provincial unions to ask them to lift the blanket ban against contracted Boks playing in the Currie Cup. This had been agreed upon before the competition started, but White realised that there would be no way of selecting Wayne Julies, Barry or Hanyani Shimange back into his squad if they did not play some rugby.

White has been criticised for withdrawing his players from the Currie Cup by several critics, including this column, but I would withdraw that criticism if White heeded Noakes’s advice to rest his top Boks for the end-of-year tour.

It is resting players for two months during a domestic season that precedes an overseas tour that makes no sense to me. If the players are to get the consecutive rest that they need, they should be resting from after the Currie Cup ends in mid-October until the middle of January. Resting in September and October when you know you have a Springbok tour to the northern hemisphere in November is no sort of rest.

If top Boks were to be rested for the end-of-year tour, and then South Africa followed New Zealand by withdrawing players until round eight of the Super 14, it would mean they effectively sit out from September 9 until April next year. That doesn’t sound like rest, it sounds like semi-retirement!

And then, regardless of whether the players go on the overseas tour or not, White will face the sort of problem he encountered with Jaco van der Westhuyzen earlier this year. He will want his players to play in the last rounds of the Super 14 for it will be imperative for them to do so if they are to be sharp for the international season.

But what if the players who play in their places in the Super 14 impress, and the Super 14 coaches decide to stick with those players for purposes of continuity? For instance, if Robbie Diack transfers Currie Cup form to the Super 14, White might battle to convince the Stormers coach that he should give Joe van Niekerk game-time.

Likewise, if Luke Watson has seven consecutive games as an openside flank in the Super 14 it is hard to see Schalk Burger, should he return to action as late as the eighth game of the competition, wearing a No 6 jersey when he does.

I think White knows these things, which is why it would surprise if on this occasion he followed the New Zealand plan in its entirety. Besides, if the New Zealand teams are weakened, it might give South African players a chance to gain some confidence by winning a few games in the Antipodes.