Wise to keep a steady head

Springbok coach Jake White is sure to come in for some criticism for his refusal to press any panic buttons for the second test against France in Port Elizabeth.

The Boks did play very poorly at times in the 30-all draw in Durban last weekend, and the coach has readily agreed with those critics who say that the team played with little pattern.

Clearly someone has to be at fault somewhere, and those aspects of the performance that have been picked at are going to have to receive a great deal of attention not just this coming week but also in the buildup to the Mandela Cup fixtures against Australia.

Looking back at last weekend’s game, there were several players who did not deliver. One of these was Jaco van der Westhuyzen, who just dropped too many balls. In my view the selection did not deliver either, for the loose-forwards were just too slow and ponderous as a unit to live with the much pacier and more mobile French unit.

This was one of the reasons the French appeared to find it so easy to outflank their opponents, and here some credit must also go to the visiting coach Bernard Laporte. He knew where the Bok weakness was and he knew how to expose it. Maybe the problem for White was that to him the French, who picked something of an untried team, were an unknown quantity and it was less easy to pinpoint their weaknesses.

Maybe the better test for him will come this weekend, when the French are expected to bear a closer resemblance to the side that played in the recent Six Nations and are therefore easier to study and plot against.

However, we should not leave this subject without acknowledging that the ability to think on the hoof and adapt is supposed to be one of the traits of great captains and great coaches and both White and John Smit did appear to take a beating in this regard in Durban.

For all that, though, we need to remember too that they did not lose. One journalist embarrassed himself a bit at the press conference when he asked Smit what it felt like to get “beaten” by a team that had only been together for a couple of days. The mood after the match was certainly one that would normally follow a defeat, and that included the mood of both Smit and White.

But maybe we should not make too much of this “together only a couple of days” thing. The French have excelled in the past after being together for a short while, and it is well known that there is perhaps more depth in French rugby than anywhere else in the world.

We know this because the Springboks have suffered for it before. In 2001 they lost in Paris to a team that fielded as many as seven new caps, most of them in the same backline.

And earlier that same year they were beaten in Johannesburg in the first test of a series they were expected to dominate against a French side that was both young and new.

Those should have been object lessons to the Boks: The French should never be underestimated. At the same time, they should also be lessons to those of us who now see a draw against France as something alarming and worthy of rugby’s equivalent of a national emergency.

When Harry Viljoen looks back on his career as Springbok coach, he may well admit that it was at Ellis Park on 16 June 20001 that it all started going wrong. Everyone expected the Boks to win, and when they didn’t, the baby was thrown out with the figurative bath-water. A number of changes were made to the team after that test and after that series. It was on the basis of this one-all series result that Andre Vos was summarily sacked as captain and Bob Skinstad was selected in his place. There are no quibbles about Skinstad’s leadership, but it was a drastic action to take and might have put the Boks under Viljoen back a long way.

Remember, at the time Skinstad was just coming back from a year away with injury, so he was not exactly up to speed as a player. The criticism which followed heaped extra pressure on Viljoen, and we all know what it was that eventually sent him down the route where by the end he was playing a game and selecting a team that was the complete antithesis of what he had started with at the end of the 2000 season.

In retrospect, though, the reaction to the French defeat was precipitate. That same combination went on to “shock” other rated sides, and they went on to become northern hemisphere champions the following year. The side that beat the Boks was the nucleus of the side that went on to represent France at the 2003 World Cup.

The side that drew with the Boks this past weekend could go on to similar achievements and glories. There is a lot going for French rugby, and as I wrote in my preview, they can never be underestimated.

The Boks should have been expected to beat the French in the opening test, but it should not be seen as such a massive shock that they didn’t. The French have beaten some great sides down the years, they quite possibly are the strongest rugby nation in Europe at the moment, and I won’t forget in a hurry how they scored a series win over New Zealand in New Zealand in 1994 before that country beat the Boks in the series that immediately followed it.

So while criticism is justified, and the Boks do need to be under pressure, let’s not make the same mistakes of previous regimes. The Boks were held to a draw playing badly against a useful team which ranks among the top rugby nations. Mistakes were made, lots of them, and many of them were mistakes that were repeated from last year. But it is not a national crisis. Not yet…