Are your interests being prioritised?

IT’S going to be a long year and it is the start of a new World Cup cycle but there are good reasons to feel that the new rugby season, which kicks off with the first round of Super Rugby clashes next weekend, can’t arrive soon enough.

It will hopefully mean the business that the average rugby fan is really interested in will start to take precedence again, and the administrative politicking, procrastinating and bungling that has become the national sport since the World Cup will at last be removed as the headline act.

Or am I being hopeful? This is South Africa after all, and not New Zealand, where if you asked the followers of the game who the chief executive or president of the national union was you might well draw a blank because there, the administrators/ elected officials just don’t make the news. That is because there, the administrators serve the sport and not themselves.

After covering rugby for two-and-a-half decades, I have a good recall of the controversies that have blighted rugby in this country. But generally when I speak to people about the past few decades, I get engagement if I refer to a Springbok match or series but vacant looks when the topic is administrative controversy.

Many avid rugby fans will be able to tell me 1998 was the year the Boks won their first Tri-Nations title. They’d know Gary Teichmann was the captain and Nick Mallett the coach. But how many would remember that as the year there were huge political ructions when the then-Sarfu president Louis Luyt threatened to take Madiba to court and was then axed from his position?

Those who are younger and don’t have that recall might instead remember the 2004 TriNations win, when John Smit was captain and Jake White was the coach. Few, though, would connect that year with the beginning of the Brian van Rooyen reign as president and the fundamental changes that were made when he put the elected provincial presidents back in charge.

Since the World Cup, officialdom has not covered itself in glory, starting with the Western Province administration’s decision to overrule director of rugby Gert Smal’s recommendation that former All Black coach John Mitchell should take over as Stormers coach and Saru president Oregan Hoskins’ admission that he helped sway his WP counterpart Thelo Wakefield on the matter.

Lions president Kevin de Klerk has subsequently denied playing a part but a colleague who works on another newspaper published a story shortly before Christmas where he quoted Hoskins on the issue.

He admitted to communicating his antipathy towards the idea of Mitchell working within the South African rugby structures to his WP counterpart.

What was Mitchell’s crime? He won a legal action against the Lions and Saru had to help that union pay Mitchell out. Was rugby, and the interest of the biggest stakeholder in the game, the rugby fan, put first there? Nope. That lost out to the old petty personal politics that has been the perennial cancer in the game.

And arguably the interests of the supporter base are not being prioritised in the controversy that has hogged rugby’s media space since December – that being the Saru reaction to the charges being brought against chief executive Jurie Roux for allegedly misappropriating funds for the benefit of the rugby club when he was involved with Stellenbosch.

The word allegedly should be in italics. That is where it is at the moment. It’s an allegation. The way I understand the law you are innocent until you are proven guilty. Legal process should be allowed to run its course and the elected officials such as Hoskins should not be pre-occupying themselves now with something that their CEO was alleged to have done at his previous job.

That might sound like an odd thing for me to say but I can’t see how all the uncertainty that has enveloped the decision-making process can be good for the sport and, most importantly, for the Springbok fan who cares about only one thing really – and that is that the national team wins when the Ireland series comes around in June.

It’s now nearly the end of February and the players still don’t know who the Bok coach will be in that series. More disturbingly, neither does the Bok coach. At this stage of Heyneke Meyer’s reign he was busying himself with the planning of training camps and he was travelling the country to talk to players and other people who were to work with him.

Ireland lost to France the other day and the retirement of several seasoned campaigners has hurt them, but they are playing at the moment.

After another couple of games they might start finding the answers to the questions and problems vexing them at present.

By contrast, their June opponents won’t be playing until then and before the season has even started, the two leading flyhalves have been ruled out by injury. Who is to be tasked with finding the replacements?

There are theories and a caretaker coach looks likely, but the current internecine conflict within the administration doesn’t inspire confidence, and neither does the prospect of Hoskins driving the process.