Unto thine own self be true

Springbok coach Jake White must have started this week feeling as though he is the most hated person in South Africa.

That is always the way with Bok coaches when they lose, and White will know it comes with the territory. A Springbok defeat, because the team are supported and followed so passionately, is always analysed and dissected in the same way that would a national calamity or natural disaster.

And make no mistake, the Boks were a disaster against the French. Much like they had in two of the three matches building up to Cape Town, they played without flair, without pace, without fluidity, and without any enterprise. Judging by the number of times players were guilty of knocking the ball on, you might also venture that at times they were seen to play without skill.

At the moment it does seem there is very little going for the Boks. This should be a time for consolidation on the hard work done over the previous two seasons and to start adding a few new attacking dimensions to their game. Instead, as so many Bok coaches have done once they find themselves under pressure, White’s approach seems to have become more conservative, and less adventurous.

From the outset this season the Boks have risked very little, be it in selection or in the way they play on the field.

But hang on, before we crucify White, let’s have a second-take here. Granted, there is a rugby revolution happening in Durban under Dick Muir, but what was so different about the Boks on Saturday compared to the general fare dished up in the Super 14?

White’s Boks have been no more conservative than most of the Super 14 teams were. The skills, or lack of skills, have been consistent with what we saw through most of the Super 14 season.

As we saw with the South African under-21 side in their final against France, players from this country are often made to look lost and inadequate when their quest for forward dominance is negated. We have seen it happen time and again with the Bulls in the Super 14, and yet they remain South Africa’s best team.

So why should we expect the Springbok team to be any different? If Wynand Olivier and De Wet Barry were not encouraged to be adventurous with their Super 14 teams, what makes us suddenly think they are going to be able to become side-stepping, super-quick ball magicians just because they are now wearing a green and gold jersey?

White is going to come under increasing pressure this season to be more enterprising, more innovative and more attacking. But since when have those words been synonomous with rugby in this country?

The French won against the Boks because apart from their forwards being up for the battle, they also have a much better understanding of time and space, and the need to run into that space, and pass the ball to where the space is.

Why this is so may have been illustrated in a recent conversation I had with Breyton Paulse. The Springbok wing admitted he had been hugely surprised by the freedom that backs enjoy over there to play their own game and make their own decisions.

And he was only echoing exactly the same view as that expressed a couple of weeks earlier by Jaco van der Westhuyzen when he was talking about what he had gained from his stint at Leicester a few years ago.

It surprised me to hear that in England, or at least at Welford Road, there is less pre-occupation with structure than there is in South Africa. What frightens me though is that Paulse was surprised by the freedom he was given in France and yet in his last few Currie Cup seasons in South Africa he was coached by Carel du Plessis. A visionary to some, Du Plessis lost his job with WP because he was regarded as eccentric for allowing his players to play too much off the cuff. Obviously his way though was not as off-the-cuff as it is in France…

Where I am going with all of this is that while I think White has made a lot of mistakes this season, I also fear that I have seen this movie before. A Springbok coach under pressure becomes more conservative. Nick Mallett did, Rudolf Straeuli did, Ian McIntosh did.

Harry Viljoen started his Bok coaching career with a rather bizarre instruction for his players not to kick the ball in a match in Buenos Aires. He ended it with a combination that played a match at Twickenham following a style that made even the most conservative Bulls team look like the Barbarians.

Yet while White appears to becoming more conservative, both in his public utterances and his game-plan, I remember what he was like before he became Bok coach. He was vehemently critical of Straeuli for being too conservative at the 2003 World Cup, and could not understand why he was not making use of the unpredictable Brent Russell.

White felt back then that Australia or New Zealand would win the World Cup because they had more runners and more game-breakers than England did.

Okay, so maybe the England win changed his thinking a bit, and the next World Cup is being played in the northern hemisphere, but surely he has not completely forgotten the outlook he used to have.

My hunch is that White is going to find himself under a lot of pressure in the coming months, and hopefully he won’t be too stubborn and will absorb some of the lessons drummed out by the French this past weekend. Maybe the defeat at Newlands would not have been in vain, and he would have finally owned up to some of his own mistakes.

Most of all though, and for his sake, let’s hope he observes the message implicit in my old school motto – ‘Quisque sibi verus’, which translates from the Latin into “Unto thine own self be true”.