Wisdom needed in Super 12 appointments

Next week, on September 27, South African rugby gets to make one of its most important decisions of the year when it decides on the four Super 12 coaches for next season.

Frankly, the fact that it is happening so late in the year is again an illustration of what has gone wrong for South African rugby for most of the last nine years that the Super 12 has been in existence. We are just not organised enough and tend to leave things until the last minute.

The planning for the 2005 Super 12 should have started at the end of the 2004 Super 12. That was what Stormers coach Gert Smal said he intended doing, and he was true to his word. Smal did quite a bit of ground work for next season in the early parts of the new international season, when his commitment to the Springboks as assistant and forward coach allowed him to.

When I spoke to Smal after the Tri-Nations win over Australia in Durban, the former Springbok forward was excited about getting the chance to get down to some serious Super 12 work in the gap that he had available to him before the Springbok tour to the United Kingdom, Ireland and Argentina.

He is a man who works incredibly hard, and Smal was getting ready to burn the midnight oil in his quest to prepare the way for the Stormers becoming the first South African winners of the Super 12 in the last year that the competition will be played under that format (from 2006 it will be a Super 14).

Smal has been around the block a few times now in the Super 12, so he knows what is required. And he was adamant during our conversation that the groundwork needs to be laid now. Smal has already impressed the officials and other workers down at Western Province headquarters with the amount of planning he has put in for next year.

The problem though is that there is a chance Smal may not even be the Stormers coach next year. Springbok coach Jake White has gone on record to say he would like Smal to work for him fulltime as his assistant, and it is possible that when the announcement is made next Tuesday, it will be Carel du Plessis, and not Smal, who will be installed as the new Super 12 coach.

This would be problematic not because I don’t rate Du Plessis as a coach, but because Smal has such a massive edge when it comes to experience, and in this competition continuity is all-important. Smal guided the Stormers to a Super 12 semi-final last year and is eager to take them one step further, and should be allowed to do so. Smal has not made any public statements about his future, but unless he has had a massive change in heart over the last month, he is also a man who desperately wants to carry on coaching a top team.

Having the job of Springbok assistant coach is dandy, and it is a position that would be coveted by many, but let’s face it, how many assistant coaches really go on to graduate to being the head coach, which is what Smal would doubtless want to be one day.

The best way for him to make a name for himself, and avoid being cast as a forward specialist, would be for him to continue to coach the Stormers, and to win the Super 12.

Although they obviously rate their provincial coach, you get the impression that the officials at WP would also prefer to have Smal in charge of the Stormers for another season. When they play in the black of the Stormers, the Cape team are just that little bit more clinical and efficient in everything they do, and Smal certainly knows how to get his forwards to play above themselves at Super 12 level.

With Du Plessis you get the impression there is one heck of a lot of potential, but that his team and his coaching is still a work in progress, something that will develop into something great but is still en route to being the finished product. To change the coach now might introduce teething problems which a team aiming for Super 12 silverware can ill-afford.

In short, Smal has been there and done that at Super 12 level. He knows his opponents, he has plotted and strategised against them for the past three seasons (Du Plessis, as assistant coach, has done the same to some extent, but being head coach is different). I have no doubt Du Plessis will in time be a great Super 12 coach, but right now Smal must keep the job and be allowed to continue the work he has been doing behind the scenes for the past few weeks.

One of the biggest problems I have with the whole situation is the fact that it appears no-one from WP, who are working with Smal at the moment preparing for next season, appears to have been consulted on the matter. It appears this is an issue in the hands of SA Rugby and the rest of the national apparatus, which is bizarre if you consider that the people working on the ground should have the best idea of what is good for their team.

The same should hold for Pretoria, where apparently the officials have been told that if they want to have Heyneke Meyer as coach of the Super 12 next year they have to be prepared to part with the around R1-million that would still be owed on Rudi Joubert’s contract.

Again, however, it is ridiculous that we are heading towards the end of September and the Bulls still don’t know who will be coaching them in the next Super 12, the buildup for which begins in January.

Winning the Super 12 requires a different approach to winning the Currie Cup, and maybe in some instances different personnel too, and if he is going to be the Super 12 coach next year then Meyer should know it already so that he can get busy with his planning.

And if it is going to be Joubert, then he needs to be able to proceed with his preparation knowing that it is happening and he is not putting in all the work for nothing.

As for the Cats, I bumped into Chester Williams during a road-race in Cape Town the other day. At that stage a decision on his future with the team he coached at the end of the last Super 12 season was due the next day. But he was living in the Cape, not in Johannesburg, where the Cats will be based, and had no idea whether he was wanted or not.

In some ways, the Cats may be the most problematic of the all the South African franchises for the simple reason that there is less continuity between Currie Cup and Super 12. If Frans Ludeke, for instance, is going to be the Super 12 coach, he is suddenly going to have to switch from his Lions mindset and start embracing some Free State ideas and personnel, currently his team’s arch rivals in a hotly contested Currie Cup season.

It is the unique nature of the Cats set-up, with the questionable marriage between the Cheetahs and the Lions, which makes me wonder if having the Currie Cup coaches of one of those provinces is a good idea. Unless players from one province are going to completely dominate the squad, which is what Laurie Mains did, having one of the Currie Cup coaches in charge appears a recipe for division and disaster.