What happens to poor mechanics

I wasn’t at the latest Peter de Villiers press conference, but from what I am told and have read, the Springbok coach has contradicted himself horribly.

On Saturday night, immediately after the game, he definitely said that he had made a mistake by making so many substitutions too soon. Now, two days later, he is telling us that he maybe should have taken off the players who built up the 26-7 lead earlier than he did. And suddenly it is the media who are negative.

When I was trolling through the King’s Park outerfields on Saturday evening after the game, it was not media people I was talking to. It was the dinkum, die-hard Springbok fan, some of them quite experienced in the ways of rugby. At that point, no-one but the people who had written them would have seen the newspaper articles that were due to appear the next morning.

Almost to a man there was disappointment, and instead of the elation you might have expected, there was a sense of hollowness. After all, for most of them, a win over the Lions was the expected, rather than just a hope, for most know their history – and the Lions don’t tend to win too many series, with the last one they won, back in 1997, being gifted to them by a naive Springbok coach.

A former Springbok coach once got into hot water for suggesting that South Africans don’t have a great knowledge about rugby, and it seems that De Villiers is saying something similar now.

If that is the case, he is insulting the greatest stake-holders in the game, those who make him who he is. Just like the marketing people couldn’t sell the South African public under-strength provincial matches against the Lions in the build-up to the test series, so the knowledgeable rugby person must surely feel completely insulted by the latest words to come out of De Villiers’s mouth.

The coach himself admitted on Saturday night that he got it wrong, to turn around now and suggest that not only did he not get it wrong, but should have made the changes sooner, is disingenuous. Everyone who knows the slightest thing about rugby who watched Saturday’s game knows who got it wrong, and why the Boks almost lost.

But it is De Villiers’s latest little parable to explain his selections, this time Ricky Januarie, that should really be taken issue with.

This is what De Villiers said about Januarie on Monday: “I am not concerned about Ricky’s form. Look, if you go to a black mechanic and he doesn’t fix your car, you don’t go back. If you go to a white mechanic and he doesn’t fix your car, you go back and make sure he fixes the problem. What I am saying is give Ricky a chance.”

So once again he appears to be drawing race into it. Frankly, I have no idea what race the person is who fixes my car because I send it in to a dealership and I don’t have direct contact with the people who work on my vehicle.

What I do know though is that if I kept taking my car to the same dealership and that company kept doing a shoddy job, I would certainly initially ask them to do a proper job, and then failing that, I would take my car elsewhere.

To suggest that Januarie’s poor form at Absa Stadium was a one-off is to ignore the fact that most people did watch the Super 14. Januarie was out of form from the very first game the Stormers played this year, the one against the Sharks. He never regained that form, and was eventually dropped for Dewald Duvenage.

It is a fact that Januarie is now a second choice at his province. Rugby is not an empirical science, so you will just have to accept my view of a match that was not televised, but I was at the SA XV match against Namibia in Windhoek at the end of May. Januarie was abjectly poor, and Jano Vermaak, when he came on, was streets better than him.

Januarie had a good season last year, but that was last year. This season he has been poor, and not just in the first test against the Lions. If he was a mechanic and he had been working on my car for the past four months, I don’t think I would be taking it back to him, for I rather fancy it would be beyond repair by now.