Will northern exposure be ‘fun’ for Bok coach and Co?
THE rugby world has begun the annual end-of-year international season, which sees the heavyweights of the northern hemisphere host the superpowers of the south over four successive weekends.
And with the World Cup creeping up, this period is hugely important as the teams jostle for psychological advantage while testing combinations.
It is, indeed, going to be a delicate balancing act because while you want to build winning momentum and confidence, this period is also the perfect opportunity to test players in the heat of international rugby.
The Springboks, for instance, play world No 1 Ireland this weekend, then go to Marseille to play the favourites for the World Cup, hosts France. They have a semblance of a breather against Italy, although let’s not forget the Azzurri recently beat the same Wales team that gave the Boks a tough ordeal in July.
The Boks are then up against Eddie Jones’ England at Twickenham.
It is, in effect, a mini World Cup for the Boks, but with the comfort that defeat is not the end of the world. There can always be the excuse of “not showing your hand” or of having blooded newcomers.
Jones was pretty much speaking for all of the coaches involved this November, including Jacques Nienaber, when he said: “The big thing for me is to make sure tactically we keep moving, but we don’t show our hand.
“It is like a contradiction now; you want to keep moving the team forward, but you don’t want to show the opposition what you are doing.
“There’s a bit of cloak-and-dagger now, 12 months out, in terms of how much you want to show. That means winning some games and being good in games to keep the players thinking that you are on the right track.
“If you are too cloak-and-dagger and you don’t have good results, the players think, ‘What’s going on here?’, and it’s hard to get them to believe,” Jones said.
“But if you show them too much, then you give the opposition too much, so it is this balancing act at the moment. “That makes this period the most fun time for coaching.”
The end-of-year Test season kicked off at the weekend and the Wallabies’ narrow win over Scotland in Edinburgh confirmed the importance of having a dead-eye goal kicker, which is something the Boks do not have right now.
Scotland looked to be heading for their fifth straight win over Australia when late in the game they had a fairly easy penalty to win the game, but Blair Kinghorn fluffed it and the Wallabies hung on to win 16-15.
That ending should be a warning for the Boks because they currently do not boast a reliable goal kicker and quite often the results of big games come down to place kicking.
Kinghorn does not kick for his club Edinburgh because they have Argentine ace Emiliano Boffelli.
Similarly, the likely flyhalf for the Boks against Ireland, Damian Willemse, is not the first-choice kicker for the Stormers, who give that responsibility to Manie Libbok.
Still, by the end of November, Nienaber could have some answers regarding his goal-kickers, and as Jones says, this is the “fun” time to be a coach.*