Why the double talk?

A curious thing went unremarked upon when Springbok coach Heyneke Meyer announced his team to play against Australia last week.

Meyer insisted that hooker Bismarck du Plessis was being rotated instead of dropped for Adriaan Strauss, when it was clear he hadn't played well in the two games against Argentina.

It's a strange path to take for a man renowned for being frank with his players, and one struggles to understand what saying it to the media was supposed to achieve.

Either way, it proved to be the first of many hard decisions Meyer needs to make over the next year if the Boks are to win the World Cup.

The most recent was making Morné Steyn pay for failing to kick a penalty out with three minutes remaining in the game against the Wallabies last weekend, a mistake that ultimately cost the Boks the game.

Meyer sugar-coated the decision to drop Steyn out of the match-day squad altogether and replace him with Handré Pollard, 20, by describing him as a match-winner and saying he knows what he brings to the party.

Given that the Boks are playing the one team they're desperate to win against this weekend, the All Blacks, it's an explanation that doesn't quite hold water.

A more plausible explanation is that the more Meyer has picked the older players, the fact that they had been there and done that under pressure, was usually trotted out as the main reason for selecting them.

Steyn missing that regulation touch-finder made a mockery of that assertion, so someone had to pay.

The other reason the hard decision had to be made is that once Pollard was identified as the potential all-round solution to the Springboks' problems at flyhalf, he has to be in the playing 23 in every game until the World Cup to speed up his development.

For all his gifts, Pollard's two games against Argentina showed he's got a long way to go to being the real thing.

While there were mitigating circumstances, like the conditions in the first game and a pack seemingly stuck in reverse in the second, people underestimate how meteoric Pollard's rise has been.

For that reason, it appears international rugby will be his finishing school, rightly or wrongly. There are similar difficult decisions to be made right through the Bok team.

It's too late to come up with a scrumhalf approaching Fourie du Preez in class, so Ruan Pienaar, the ultimate confidence player, needs to have his hand held and conned into thinking he's number one even when Du Preez is around.

For every creaking Jean de Villiers, a Jan Serfontein needs to be fast-tracked into being able to take over. For every Willem Alberts, a like-for-like replacement needs to be found (Warren Whiteley doesn't make sense when Oupa Mohoje was described as big and strong and a lineout option).

A decision also needs to be made about what to do at outside centre. Rugby fans are scratching their heads and asking why Sibusiso Sithole and Juan de Jongh didn't merit an opportunity to try to stake their claim for the position.

And, with that, we need to address the elephant in the Boks' selection room.

I'm not one to use social media as a research tool for the rugby public's feelings, but there are rumblings on those platforms about black players seemingly being pawns in a chess game that hasn't been explained to us.

Given that it looks like Meyer doesn't rate the players, he should give rugby reasons for why he doesn't, and cut his losses. It wouldn't be a popular admission, but at least everyone would know where they stand.