We are just far too insular

There is one thing that always stands out whenever you make contact with one of South Africa's many expatriate players who have either done time or are still doing time with an overseas club.

It is how much they learn from the many different rugby nationalities they come across when playing overseas. To a man, they all insist that one of the keys to the rapid improvement of the standard of British rugby is the number of foreigners plying their trade over there.

Of course, to some extent they have to say that. They need to justify their own presence in a country where there is a growing unhappiness at the number of outsiders filling top rugby positions. At the playing level, it stands to reason that the more foreigners there are playing in their leagues, the fewer eligible Englishmen (or Scots, Welshmen or Irishmen) are available for their national side.

But while that may be the argument now, it wasn't in the late 1990s, when northern hemisphere rugby people readily admitted that the rapid improvement of the game over their could be ascribed to the influx of southern hemisphere ideas.

Now, as the All Blacks and Australians beaten recently on their home turf by England will readily attest, they are beating us at their own game.

In a conversation with Ian McIntosh the other day, the subject turned to Naas Botha. In Mac's view, Botha's exposure to the Australian way through his Rovigo teammate Willie Ofanehaguae led him to adjust to the more modern way of playing towards the end of his career.

Sadly this was after Botha had retired from the Boks and it is one of McIntosh's big regrets that he did not think of persuading Botha to play on. He reckons Botha did have the skill and the ability to play the more direct, modern game.

This is just one example of where a South African player may have benefitted from playing alongside a foreign player, rather than against him.

When Robbie Kempson returned recently from Ulster to stake his claim for the Springbok World Cup squad, national coach Rudolf Straeuli made the point that he was valuable because of his exposure to northern hemisphere players and conditions.

Surely this would apply in reverse - in other words, if South Africa dropped all curbs on foreign players playing in local leagues and for our teams in the Super 12.

Okay, maybe that should be adjusted - we should not drop all curbs, but teams should be entitled to recruit a minimum of two overseas players. Natal did it last year for the Currie Cup, and some of the Sharks speak glowingly of what they learned about scrumming from the legendary Argentinian, Federico Mendez.

But it would be even more beneficial if, for instance, after the last World Cup the South African authorities had done something to lure the great Wallaby centre, Tim Horan, to our shores.

He had mentioned an interest in playing for the Sharks, but was prevented from taking the thought further by the knowledge that foreign players were not allowed to play for South African Super 12 sides.

My guess is that had Horan come, admittedly at some cost to Natal, the investment would have paid itself back by having a profound impact on the rugby acumen of Trevor Halstead.

This column has dealt before with the idiocy of the South African paranoia about foreign coaches. Yet those same people who have a problem with hiring a foreigner are the first to call for the Springbok coach's head when he loses a test match.

In chopping and changing eight Bok coaches in the past 10 years, South Africa has experienced virtually every top South African born coach. Most of our top guys lack experience and Laurie Mains is right when he says that coaches here are changed too quickly for them to be able to gain any experience.

He says that South African coaches don't get to learn from their mistakes, which in the case of Nick Mallett, the sacking of whom was surely SA Rugby's biggest blunder of all time, is certainly true.

The current Bok management that is so maligned by the critics happens to have all the other top South African born coaches (with the notable exception of Heyneke Meyer) working for it.

Any successful coach will tell you that the most important ingredient for a top coach is experience. One of the problems in SA rugby at the moment is that so many of the top guys do lack that experience, and in this regard it was refreshing the other night to be told by Dick Muir, two time national club championship winner, that he felt he needed another four years before making the step up to provincial level.

It is because they lack experience at the moment that any lobby in favour of Francois Pienaar or Chester Williams has to be regarded as nothing more than fanciful. Williams has started out on the road and he will make a significant step forward in his career next year when he becomes Tim Lane's assistant at the Cats.

But don't rush the guy now - he would be the first to admit he is not ready. Like it or not, apart from the current people in position, the only South Africans qualified to coach the Boks at the moment are those who are either currently coaching overseas or have coached overseas.

The likes of Alan Solomons, Mallett, Brendan Venter and former Saracens coach Alan Zondagh (who was offered the job of England Performance Director before deciding instead to come home) have done well in the northern hemisphere and SA Rugby should be doing more than they are at the moment to tap their brains.

In the meantime, South Africans must stop being insular, for it is this insularity that leads our rugby players to be so out of step with modern trends and so far behind the eight-ball when it comes to cerebral rugby.

Next time a foreign coach gets appointed as one of our provincial coaches don't get into a frothy and predict doom and gloom for our rugby - if you take time to think about it, you will reflect that the doom and gloom is there already, and cannot be imported.