Viljoen fiasco is price rugby has to pay

So where were you when you first heard that Harry Viljoen was going to resign?

Did you have an idea that this bombshell was going to be dropped?

The answer to the first question is that I was camping alongside the Keurbooms River near Plettenberg Bay. The answer to the second question is no, like everyone else, including it seems SA Rugby director Rian Oberholzer, Viljoen's decision came out of the blue.

But was it a surprise? It should not have been as this was not the first time I was completely blindsided by a Viljoen resignation. In late 1994, when he quit the Natal job and I was supposed to have my finger on the pulse as the chief rugby writer of the Natal Mercury, I heard about his decision at a bar in the Drakensberg.

In 1998, when he walked out of the Stormers, the news had filtered through to me as a rumour. I phoned him and nearly fell on my back when he blurted out that it was true.

I made no attempt then to hide my irritation at him for his betrayal of those who had employed him and those who had had their immediate futures entrusted to him. My sentiments would have been similar on Saturday.

When you take charge of a team you have a responsibility to more than just yourself. While we can all sympathise with Viljoen, maybe even admire him, for being true to himself, you also have to weigh up the immense damage that his sudden departure would have done for the immediate short-term prospects of South African rugby.

Assuming that one of Gert Smal or Rudolf Straeuli is called in to replace him, Viljoen's decision effectively means that one of South Africa's top Super 12 teams might be going into the competition with a new coach.

That is not an ideal way to approach a competition as demanding as the Super 12 is.

Had the decision been made last year, rugby would at least have had some time to appoint a new coach and the important decisions would not have demanded such haste.

Viljoen's decision was probably on the cards from last July, which was when the coach gave up his grand visions in place of a more pragmatic approach which unfortunately just became more and more conservative and unlike Viljoen with every passing Test match.

He stopped trusting his intincts and as a consequence of this he failed to prove to his critics that there was some method in his approach. Instead we were left with a vision of a wide-eyed rabbit caught in the headlights.

As one of the few who had clung to the hope that Viljoen might just have some genius up his sleeve, I lament the fact that we will never know whether the path he struck out on last May and subsequently abandoned two months later was the right one or not.

Yes, of course Viljoen did feel the media pressure. And he may be right when he suggests that the South African rugby media, and by implication the rugby public, are unnecessarily negative at times.

Those who pilloried Viljoen when he dared to be bold in the early stages of his tenure by selecting young players and instructing his players not to kick, also need to take a long hard look in the mirror.

Has South African rugby got an innate aversion to anything that is new and that may fly in the face of tradition and the old strengths which made the Springboks strong in a different rugby era?

Many of us, had we been confronted by the pressures Viljoen faced, might have done the same thing. He did appear to be in a no-win situation - witness how the same people who criticised him after the Newlands test against the All Blacks for leaving out Braam van Straaten rounded on him for including him in the match against England at Twickenham a few months later.

But you expect your Springbok coach to be a level above the average man when it comes to handling pressure. And that is why ultimately the decision makers at Sarfu have to be held to blame for this latest fiasco.

Viljoen said in a radio inteview after his resignation that you can only understand the magnitude of the pressure once you are in the job.

But his own track record suggests that even the pressures which he had to confront at provincial level were too much for him.

How was he ever supposed to cope with the public scrutiny and downright nastiness that is part of the life of a Springbok coach?

That so much of it is unfair is not the issue. Ian McIntosh, in retrospect, did not deserve the public villification (it was not just Louis Luyt who turned against Mac) he received for his narrow series defeat in New Zealand in 1994.

Nick Mallett was being pilloried long before his record slumped to the extent that it did later in his career.

Both of these personalities will sympathise with Viljoen. They should understand the apparent madness that afflicts coaches when they are subjected to the excessive pressure which comes with the job.

But they did not buckle like Viljoen did. They understood that it was the price which had to be paid for being Bok coach. Viljoen never understood this, and those who appointed him should have been aware from the outset that they were negotiating with a man who was far too sensitive to take the brickbats.

That his healthy bank balance made him less likely to hang on to the job in times of crisis was another negative which Sarfu ignored at their peril.

There were plenty of warning signs that he would conform to his habit of walking out before a job was complete. For instance, how many times in those early days did he remind us that he did not need the job? It was a recurring theme every time it started to get hot in the kitchen - "I could just walk out at any time".

Remember how he nearly never took up the position because Sarfu had foisted Andre Markgraaff onto him as an assistant coach.

Then, once he got his way on that one and made an about-turn by reopening his own negotiations with Markgraaff, he nearly walked out when it became apparent that Markgraaff might be ruled out for political reasons.

Some of his allies criticised me when I wrote at the time of his appointment that he may lack the backbone for the job. This was not a personal jibe at Viljoen, who I have always liked, but just a sober assessment of his track record.

What other top company would appoint a leader who had walked out of his previous three jobs?

On top of all that, and again this criticism was made at the time, Viljoen had not coached at any level for over three years.

In that sense the decision to appoint him was similar to the controversial appointment of Carel du Plessis a few years earlier - it was guided by gut-feel rather than empirical evidence or recent track record.

The problem of course was that Viljoen had Sarfu over a barrel. The executive had made it clear to Oberholzer that they could not tolerate what they saw as Mallett's arrogance any longer and Viljoen's name, in the absence of any obvious candidates at provincial level, was forwarded as a replacement.

Mallett's hot-headed statements - if indeed they were that - over ticket prices at King's Park were matched by equally hot-headed decision making from those who administer the game.

Mallett was out and there had to be a replacement. The price did not matter so into the hot-seat stepped a many who had shown over and over again that he was unwilling to live through the hard times that are part of a rugby coach's life.

It seems now that South African rugby has paid an awfully heavy price for Mallett's off the cuff comments about ticket prices.