Springboks have time to improve before World Cup
The result seemed almost inevitable for the Springboks in Cardiff; so too the performance — or lack thereof — in the opening 20 minutes.
Wales won for a third successive time against the Boks in the past three years. The Welsh have only beaten SA four times over all the years.
Wales, since Warren Gatland took charge as coach, have won four times in 35 games against New Zealand, Australia and SA. Three of those have been against SA. One was against Australia many years back.
Wales, depleted through injury and unavailability, triumphed against a Bok team that failed to fire in the opening 20 minutes and conceded three tries in the opening half hour.
The Boks are some way off the pace. If you want to know by just how much then compare what the All Blacks did to France and Wales in the past few weeks. They won by 20 and 15 points respectively. The Boks won by one point against France and lost by two to Wales.
Coach Allister Coetzee has not delivered in two seasons, despite his protests that it’s a team on the rise. It is not in terms of results or performance when it comes to the past two season’s 25 Tests.
SA’s rugby bosses cannot continue to invest in Coetzee. There are 18 Tests before the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan. That’s enough time to improve the Boks. There is enough talent in this country and abroad for them to be a top-three team and not the sixth-best in the world.
The Boks should not be losing to Wales. They should not be taking 57 points in New Zealand against the All Blacks and they certainly should not leave Dublin with a 35-point differential against Ireland.
Coetzee has been defiant all season, in terms of his approach and his selections. He has talked about continuity and about keeping faith in those players in whom he believes.
But he has invested in players who have won just 44% over 25 Tests. He has invested in players who haven’t beaten the world’s best teams. He has presided over the most infamous record-breaking sequence in Springbok history.
The failure is obvious to everyone except Coetzee. His postmatch rhetoric has been as uninspired as the team’s results. There has been nothing to suggest he could improve SA’s results over the next 18 months because he has been insistent that he has been doing it the right way every weekend.
There will be a review of Coetzee’s season and hopefully there will be transparency in what this review delivers.
I’d hope common sense is the victor and that there is an acknowledgement from SA’s rugby bosses that they got it wrong with Coetzee.
There is still time to get it right and there is no crime in having got it wrong two years ago. The crime would be in retaining the status quo.
England, post-2015, are an example of how the quality of a coach can transform the standing of a team. Under Stuart Lancaster, England were awful, but the same players have lost just once in 23 Tests since Eddie Jones took over.
The coach is more than the bus that transports the players. A coach does make a difference and Rassie Erasmus, back in SA as the director of rugby for all national teams, will spearhead that change of fortunes.
Erasmus can double up on the role of director and head coach, and he too will be judged according to results.
Give him the responsibility and most importantly give him the 18 months free of the inherited baggage of Coetzee.
The Boks don’t need a fouryear plan. They need to beat England in a three-Test series in June 2018. That’s how quickly things can change.
I’ll never despair when it comes to the Boks because the factory of playing talent remains strong. It’s the identification at national level that has been questionable in the past two years. More of the same will only yield more of the same in results.
There is no one messiah to the Boks’ resurrection, but we’ll only know if Erasmus can replicate what he did at Munster if he is given the responsibility to do it his way. Like Coetzee, he will be judged on results, which is the way it should be in professional sport.