Forget about Fantasy Boks

28 July 2011 - 02:03 By Simnikiwe Xabanisa
subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now
Simnikiwe Xabanisa
Simnikiwe Xabanisa
Image: SUPPLIED

As the Springbok coach and captain groped for elusive positives from their defeat against the Wallabies last weekend, one couldn't help but reach the illogical conclusion that they could also be telling us: "We told you so."

One of our national pastimes appears to be putting together teams based on form. If our armchair selections are anything to go by, we live and die by the adage that you're only as good as the last quarter you played.

Our many Bok barometers, which hardly ever feature regular Springboks, and the fact that we complain about Sarel Pretorius's omission - when the truth is he would be hard-pressed to make a similar impact at test level as he did in Super rugby - tend to confirm this.

Former Springbok coach Jake White used to say the best players don't always make the best teams.

The Bok team which played against Australia in the Tri-Nations opener was mostly made up of players who were the form players in Super rugby.

But the nearest thing they had to a combination was the halfback pairing of Ruan Pienaar and Morne Steyn, who last played together on a weekly basis in primary school.

Halfback partnerships forged in primary school can be slightly misleading when you consider that Bakkies Botha and Danie Rossouw also formed a fearsome halfback pairing at the same stage.

So you had a bunch of players unfamiliar with each other playing against a team which has played together for the last two years.

Not knowing the player next to you leads to hesitation, and hesitation robs you of the one ingredient needed to win test matches - intensity.

Consequently, the lineouts were disjointed; the rolling mauls a collateral damage of that; and the Boks were almost always second-best at the collisions.

The defence went the same way, with the first line breached with alarming regularity. In retrospect, we should have seen that the defence could be a shambles when new combinations had to contend with an alien defensive system.

With Jacques Nienaber on board with the Boks, one can only presume they were trying the Stormers' defensive pattern.

With only Juan de Jongh and Gio Aplon familiar with it in the backline, how easily would it come to the players as a collective?

Top that off with the added, if unwanted, incentive of competing for the remaining Rugby World Cup spots and you were always going to get a few players doing their own thing to further their varying causes.

The overall result was that the Boks didn't once look like playing their own game, which is based on territory, lineouts, eye-watering collisions and bone-jarring defence.

Instead, they tried to take on a team with four of the biggest game-breakers in rugby at the moment - Will Genia, Quade Cooper, Digby Ioane and Kurtley Beale - at their fast and loose game, and finished a distant second.

There are some rumblings that the Sydney result was final proof that Peter de Villiers can't get a team to gel. Without going out on a limb on his behalf, one would imagine the best place for teams to gel was out in the middle against real opposition.

Be that as it may, the Boks' defeat to Australia showed, a bit like our problems at Eskom, that it helps to have guys who know what they are doing when the brown stuff hits the fan.

So we need to lose our obsession with the next men, when the main men are either training or wrapped in cottonwool in Rustenburg.

There's a good reason fantasy teams are known as that.

subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now