White wrong to swipe at Bulls

Springbok coach Jake White has it wrong when he takes a swipe at the Bulls for the injuries that have ruled Bakkies Botha and Bryan Habana out of the initial stages of the international season.

If White wants to blame anyone for the injury crisis he now feels he faces, and which happen to every coach from time to time as rugby is a contact sport, he should be taking aim at his bosses for having the gall to think that there should be any rugby at all beneath international level.

He should question them for entering South African teams into the Super 14, and then encouraging those teams to do as well as they possibly can so that they make the semi-finals and possibly the final.

He should question them for allowing big businesses to grow up around these Super 14 franchises, with their big sponsorships. He should also take aim at them for allowing a situation to develop where a coach’s livelihood and career goes on the line for Super 14 performance.

Coaches like Heyneke Meyer live and die on their Super 14 results. Just ask poor Frans Ludeke, who is now out of his job at the Cats and the Lions, and if the mood in the Cape is anything to go on, we could yet find that he is not the only coach to lose his job due to non-performance.

Forgive the sarcastic tone, but when White has a whinge against the Bulls for daring to play his top two players in a Super 14 semi-final, he comes across a little too much like Clive Woodward – and for all the wrong reasons.

I know White and Meyer clashed over management of players last season. I also know that Meyer had a plausible explanation, and quite contrary to what White was saying, he proved to me in an interview that I did with him that he does manage his players very well.

I don’t have the stats in front of me, but I would be surprised if Botha saw out a full game this season for the Bulls. Meyer used him sparingly, and he didn’t even start the important clash with the Stormers in Cape Town two weeks ago. Habana, it will be recalled, was also rested not long ago.

Meyer does have a highly professional and skilled medical staff working for him at the Bulls. They monitor his players in a very efficient and thorough manner, and those on the inside know that this is one of the reasons that the Bulls are so far ahead of the rest of the South African teams.

If any South African coach has perfected the art of rotation, it is Meyer. It will be recalled that a few years ago he fielded a second string team in an important Currie Cup match against Western Province at Loftus. There have been many other occasions that he has done the same.

There may be South African teams in the Super 14 who at various stages during the season looked fatigued. But the Bulls did not lose the Super 14 semi-final because they were not conditioned, but because they are just not as skilled, as clinical and as efficient as the Crusaders. Who in South African rugby is?

If White’s outburst is directed at the Bulls, he opens himself to charges of hypocrisy. That there is a problem with the amount of rugby played is not debatable. This weekend Graham Henry, the All Black coach, announced his intention to persuade his bosses to limit the amount of rugby that the All Blacks play in next year’s Super 14.

This is because White is not the only international coach sitting at the moment with injuries. Henry has several injury problems too, as indeed do Australia. Those who disagree should recall that Stephen Larkham missed a sizeable chunk of the Super 14 not because he was being rested, but because he was injured.

These injuries happen in a contact sport, and no amount of rotation and resting gives you complete insurance against them.

White though could have made his own life a lot easier had he heeded the call last year of many critics (I was not one of them) to rest his top players rather than send them on yet another end of season tour. Instead of resting players, he at one stage gave his public support to a possible extra test match against Italy, and even said he would select his top players for that.

All the fitness experts I spoke to were in agreement that what the players needed more than anything else was consecutive rest. That means they needed to rest for a couple of months, and that this was a much preferable option than being given a few games off during the course of a season, when they still have to stay mentally and physically sharp even if they are sitting out.

But White called out all his top players for the tour, and the only reason we got to see guys like Meyer Bosman tried on that trip was because there were injuries. Had all the players from the Tri-Nations been fit, they would all have travelled.

This was different from the policy adopted by the All Blacks, and also different to some extent to the policies being adopted by the northern hemisphere teams when they undertake tours of the southern hemisphere nations at the start of our international season.

Of course, White had his reasons. I did not argue against his selections as I could see the merit of getting the Bok squad to win some big games in the northern hemisphere ahead of a World Cup in the northern hemisphere.

The point though is that those reasons over-rode his concern that the players would be better off having a rest. He also was quite understandably concerned about win percentages, because in South African rugby this does determine how long you remain national coach.

But if White really wants the Super 14 coaches to use players sparingly, then he must start doing so too. And that means not just in the early season games, which count for nothing and the Boks should expect to win with a second-string team, but the big ones as well. They don’t come any bigger than a Super 14 semi-final, and it is hard to believe that White would have left out Botha in a similar situation – even if he was under an injury cloud.