SA teams must be smarter

Up until Monday night, few rugby fans had heard of Pukke flyhalf Johnny Welthagen.

The BCom Accounting student shot to prominence this week by doing the typically South African thing on the rugby field: snatching defeat from glorious victory.

With his team on the way to winning their first Varsity Cup title against UCT, all he had to do in the 82nd minute was kick the ball out for the referee to blow for the end of the game.

But he inexplicably went for a dropped goal which was charged down, with UCT gathering possession and going on to score and win the game instead.

It's unfair to pick on a 23-year-old for this, but Welthagen is unfortunately the latest manifestation of South African rugby's reluctance to encourage thinking among its players.

There was an element of inevitability this past weekend when it was the SA teams who blinked first in the trans-Indian Ocean staring contest.

No Super 15 team had travelled across the Indian Ocean and won this season, but the Lions allowed the Crusaders to break that sequence.

While the Lions were outplayed, it was the Cheetahs' and the Bulls' results that caught the eye for brain-fade efforts. The Cheetahs blew a 34-10 halftime lead against the Chiefs to draw 43-43.

The basic reason for that collapse appeared to be a change of mentality where the Cheetahs went from attacking with pace and offloading in the tackle to not wanting possession at all.

It's a South African mentality that if you don't have the ball you're less likely to make mistakes. While true, it also negates the age-old theory that if you have the ball you can dictate terms - provided you know what to do with it.

The Bulls squandered a great chance of being the first SA team to win in Australasia this season with some shoddy decision-making on Saturday.

Flanker Dewald Potgieter, who sports Tom Cruise's Last Samurai look since returning from Japan, nearly wrote off two of his teammates by going all kamikaze-like into tackles he shouldn't have been flying into.

It's a South African thing, where one player is in the process of making a tackle, only for a teammate to fly in to over-egg the tackle instead of waiting for it to be completed to contest the ball.

Potgieter flew into a Deon Stegmann tackle and his momentum twisted the latter's groin, ending his match and tour in the process.

Potgieter again rushed into Stegmann's replacement Jacques du Plessis's tackle, which ended up in a clash of heads and left Du Plessis's nose bloodied.

The scary thing is Potgieter is one of our cleverer players, yet he makes typically rush-of-blood decisions in the heat of the moment.

Then came scrumhalf Piet van Zyl, who kicked possession away on the stroke of the full-time hooter despite his team chasing the game.

Stormers No8 Duane Vermeulen this week unwittingly touched on why our players struggle to make decisions based on what they see by saying: "We have simple plans. We don't play rugby in our own half, even if we get a good turnover ball in our 22 for instance.

"That is the culture here . but from time to time we have someone who goes off plan."

The catch with that mentality is that if the players are supposed to memorise their next five to 10 phases, surely the opposition could do the same by studying videos of them?

And by the sounds of it, not only are players discouraged from doing something different if it presents itself, there is a likelihood of recrimination if it doesn't come off.

There's nothing wrong with SA teams' physicality, but since when is being smart weak?