Jones on Bok politics

Writing for the Times online, controversial UK rugby journalist Stephen Jones talks about political interference in Springbok rugby.

“South Africa remain on course to take New Zealand to the wire in Durban on Saturday, in what will be a supercharged Tri-Nations game, and in the World Cup. But they also remain on course for disaster, for a total collapse in their results, reducing the Tri-Nations to a contest between New Zealand and Australia.

A torrent of departures of their best players to European rugby and the emigration of their brightest young talent in search of Test rugby for other nations, notably Australia, are to blame. They are following the path of Clyde Rathbone, the South Africa Under-21 captain who is now a Wallaby, and Matt Stevens, the prop who plays for England.

It has been a shocking week. As rank disloyalty goes, it seems the comments from Pieter de Villiers, the coach of the Emerging Springboks team, take all the beating. Remember that anyone coaching an emerging XV is there as part of the big picture, to produce players for and maintain the closest links with the national coach and his team.

De Villiers has apparently decided two things about the Springboks. First, he wants to coach them, and believes he is good enough. His criteria is that when he was coach of the U21 team he won the world title away from home and then lost in a final away from home. “Jake [White, the current South Africa coach] won his U21 world title at home and came fourth away from home,” he said. No mention in that spurious comparison that de Villiers’ pedigree at full professional level is nonexistent.

Second, de Villiers apparently does not want the Springboks to win games. If he is appointed, he will make “transformation” selections. Bluntly, this means picking nonwhites for the sake of it. Staggeringly, no senior figure in the South African Rugby Union (SARU) has denied reports surfacing last week that they will require every Springbok team from the start of 2008 to include at least 10 nonwhite players, as part of a plan to “Africanise” the Boks.

De Villiers sees transformation as more important than Test results. “There will be pain but it is something we must go through to transform the team,” he says. Pain, indeed. If de Villiers believes for one minute that he will still be in the job after 10 inevitable consecutive defeats against serious opposition, if he seriously believes Springbok fans of any colour will gaily applaud the number of nonwhites in their losing team, then he is even more naive in the ways of the sporting world than we imagined. He will also see a mass exodus overseas of white players whose path to the Springboks is barred by political expediency. De Villiers has even named his Springbok captain, Luke Watson, the (white) flanker. Watson, poor man, is a cause célèbre and in the stated view of some, an honorary black, since he is the son of the wonderful Cheeky Watson, the antiapartheid activist and player. There are many, inside and outside the nest of vipers that is South African rugby, who claim White does not pick Watson because of a sinister old-guard plot to get at the Watson family.

This is rubbish. Those of us who have studied Watson’s game see him as a Guinness Premiership squad man but rarely a starter. For yesterday’s match, a world-class back rower such as Danie Rossouw could not make the starting lineup and it is an insult to pretend Watson is in that class, let alone as good as Juan Smith, Schalk Burger and Pierre Spies, arguably the best back row in the world.

So the first South Africa team of 2008 will have 10 nonwhites? Which 10? One of the leading professional observers of the South African game, famously emancipated and with no axe to grind, believes that two nonwhite players – the dazzling Bryan Habana and another wing, Akona Ndungane – are good enough to start for the Springboks. I find Ndungane rather frail, though feel that Ash-win Willemse, the starting wing yesterday, deserves a place and also that Gurthro Steenkamp, the prop, is in on merit. I also admire Kabamba Floors, the pocket battleship flanker.

But 10 starting nonwhites? To be brutal, there are too many nonwhites in South Africa already who have caps that on sporting grounds they did not deserve. Last week, things become worse. SARU, a disastrous organisation during and after apartheid with a grisly habit of choosing the wrong president, was arraigned before the parliamentary sports committee. The committee chairman, Bantu Holomisa, has already suggested that the passports of players should be impounded if the South African team does not become more representative of the country’s racial mix. Another committee member, Tsietsi Louw, said black players were not being chosen because “we are dealing with a political problem here”.

Granted, SARU’s written transformation charter is tosh, speaking of “expanding and accelerating the identification, incubation and development of the available unexplored human resource base”. I think that means they want to pick more black blokes. The South African government’s two-faced approach is also ruinous. If they want an official quota system, fine. They should have the courage to make it law so everybody knows where they stand; in the losers’ dressing room, but at last there would be honesty. But they try to impose quotas by stealth and bullying. As Nick Mallett, the former Springbok coach, says: “Before I announced my teams I used to ring and ask if I was subject to any quota for nonwhite players. They would assure me no. But after I’d announced the team, they’d complain there weren’t enough nonwhites.”

The target, disastrously, is being missed. You cannot suddenly declare certain players to be good enough because it creates a racial balance. Sporting excellence springs from deeper, from the past, from youth. There are culprits in South African rugby, but Jake White is not among them. He is trying to win Tests and can work only with what he is given. What we are seeing is the failure of the development process in South African rugby to bring forward enough nonwhites of true class. It is 15 years since South Africa returned to Test rugby, postapartheid. That is long enough.

It was always going to be hard, but by now, more people should have been brought into the fold, and more of the elite should be nonwhite. It is the people in charge of development, over the years, of all races, who are at fault. There have been pockets of good work, but overall, failure. I agree with the government’s view that South Africa’s Super 14 franchises have been lamentable in their development of nonwhites and their impatience is understandable. A team of black Boks would be magnificent. But that team is not ready to play. Simple, very sad, but true.

And the activists are taking pot shots at the nearest easy target. Finance, expertise and passion must be reinjected into the system to galvanise nonwhite players, and at the top end, inadequate Springboks must be discarded. De Villiers may well be coach of South Africa after the World Cup. If and when he sends out his 10 nonwhite players, and even though his failure to back White should prickle his conscience, he may have the right to feel good about himself, on grounds of simple morality. But one thing is certain. He will lose.

Turning the Springboks black

South African rugby union is under increasing pressure to include more black players in its teams. It is nothing new

– In 1992, South African rugby returned to the international fold and promised to bring forward thousands of nonwhite players

– In 1995, the one-nation banner under which the Springboks won the World Cup briefly helped the process. President Nelson Mandela presented the World Cup trophy wearing a Springbok jersey

– By 2000, national coaches were under increasing pressure from the government to choose more nonwhite players

– While improving the national team out of sight, head coach Jake White has been vilified for not choosing more nonwhites, though others believe that he has chosen some nonwhite players for expediency, not merit

– SARU is not denying reports that the first Springbok team of 2008 will have to have at least 10 nonwhites in the starting team”