No Boks coach on horizon yet as Hoskins mulls choices

South African rugby boss Oregan Hoskins is true to his word.

When national coach Heyneke Meyer was squeezed out and the coaching trouble erupted at the Stormers, Hoskins said the national union would “take their time” settling on a Springbok supremo. Nothing has happened since Meyer moved on from his test role at the start of the month.

That may be the result of opposing factions within SARU and the union’s inability to entice candidates of sufficient quality.

Since the Boks bombed out against Japan at the Rugby World Cup and were then beaten by the All Blacks in the semifinal, there have been increasing calls for SARU to match the calibre of the All Blacks group.

Meyer’s one win from eight tests against the All Blacks was a compounding reason for his post World Cup demise.

After a mid-December council meeting there were noises that leading candidate Allister Coetzee, who coached the Stormers and now Kobe Steel in Japan, was seen as a competent and conservative leader without the gifts to take them to the next level. However, he does have a strong record of picking three or more black players in his starting teams and Hoskins is adamant the Springboks must put transformation issues, alongside results, at the top of their priority list for the next four years.

“We’ve signed an agreement with the sports governing body in the country and the ministry and we believe in it. So as a sport we need to go forward with that in mind,” Hoskins said.

The agreement states that the Springboks will have 50/50 player representation by 2019.

There is support for former test loose forward Rassie Erasmus who is SARU’s general manager of high performance after switching from coaching to a similar director’s role over Coetzee at the Stormers. He is depicted as a convincing tactician but someone who does not warm to all the additional duties of a head coach.