OPINION – Beating up on the South African Rugby team seems to be a pretty safe bet at the moment. However, after the result at the weekend, few would disagree with it being warranted.
If you look at South Africa’s Rugby Championship result, it started poorly but it could have gotten better after the first two matches. A four point loss first up to the Australians in Brisbane – an unlucky result particularly after outplaying the home team for the majority of the match, followed by a seven point loss to the All Blacks at home – understandable, given this All Blacks team is still, by quite some distance the best team in the world.
From that point, it was zero out of two – not so bad when you take into consideration that one match was away against a resurgent Wallaby team and the other match against the front-runners and bookies’ favourite to take home Bill in two months time. That was until the blue and white bomb hit.
For all intents and purposes, South Africa were expected to win and win well on Saturday against a Pumas team coming off a hiding in Mendoza. However, few would have predicted that South Africa would be pushed around and convincingly beaten in their own backyard, consigning them to last place in the Rugby Championship for the first time in the tournament’s limited history.
Luckily, the majority of the group humiliated in Durban will have a chance to rectify the result in their warm-up match against Argentina in Mendoza on Saturday. Then they’ll have a solid month of training and dodging media barbs to forget about their woeful Rugby Championship campaign in order to prepare an assault on the cup of all cups kicking off in just over a months’ time.
So, where does Springbok Coach Heyneke Meyer go from here? It’s a question that we’ve internalised here at the Rugby Drum for a couple of days but it’s tough to know the answer after the tumultuous month they’ve had.
“This does not put us back for the Rugby World Cup,” Meyer told reporters after the woeful performance in Durban.
“We could not adapt and sadly, we were just not good enough today. I apologise to the nation as the buck stops with me as coach. There are no excuses.”
That’s for sure!
But not being able to adapt as well as the other issues Meyer pointed out in the loss on Saturday are huge issues – a World Cup is all about adapting to different game plans and different game styles so if they can’t do it at home against a team who they’d never lost against until Saturday, how can they expect to do it on the biggest stage of all?
If South Africa’s fourth test loss in a row (the most since a loss of five under Jake White in 2006) is not the sign of a team in serious decline than we’re not quite sure what is.
Meyer’s players looked tired, uninterested and uninspired against Argentina which has heaped pressure onto the national rugby team and, moving forward, they have to turn it around reasonably quickly. After 80 minutes on Saturday, the next time they pull the green jersey on will be in Brighton on 19 September…
Whether they like it or not, South Africa’s stuck with Heyneke Meyer at the helm as no rugby board in their right mind would change the coach with just one match remaining before the Rugby World Cup . This means that they must look somewhere else to fix this supposed lull in South African rugby, reflected in their Super Rugby performances, now in their national team.
Is it an issue remedied by selection? If so, it’s a little late to be bringing new players into the fold, especially with just one more match before the big show hits London in September. Or is it simply just man management and getting the best out of his players?
Put simply, Meyer’s job is on the line and the matter of fact is that the issue may already be resolved by the powers that be in South African rugby whether or not he wins the World Cup, a similar position to the one Philippe Saint-Andre, France’s head coach is in. And it’s going to be doubly hard without his left hand man there, Jean de Villiers who is touch and go for the tournament due to a broken jaw suffered in the loss.
Few coaches struggle to get their players up for a game which is why the reason they’re there in the first place. But judging from the Saturday’s performance, Meyer has got a job similar to rugby’s version of climbing Mt Everest if he’s going to get his players up for a Rugby World Cup, the grandest rugby cup of all. Than again, if he can’t get his players up for a World Cup than he won’t get them up for anything.