Cape Town - The rugby year that has just been completed saw the All Blacks comfortably retain their status as the world’s number one team, but it wasn’t without the considerable help of the lunacy, in some cases on the field and in others off it, of some of the nations they would consider the main rivals to their World Cup title.
England, considered among the favourites for next year’s World Cup just because they are hosting it, persisted with a flyhalf who plays more like a hooker than a backline player during the November series against the southern nations. So it wasn’t surprising that they came short against everyone other than Australia, who by the end of their tour had started to become the whipping boys of every opponent.
Talking of Australia, it was Down Under where the most off-field lunacy took place, though perhaps the most written about and controversial incident, that involving that perennial miscreant Kurtley Beale and a member of the Wallaby backroom staff, took place at 39 000 feet somewhere between South Africa and Argentina.
A text, a verbal altercation, and suddenly Australian rugby was plunged into crisis again, and not for the first time in the year either. England cricket’s big failing in recent years has been its failure to accommodate the singular personality and ego of Kevin Pietersen, whereas Australian rugby’s problem appears to be the opposite - they have too many Kevin Pietersens.
The upshot was that another Wallaby coach fell on his sword, this time Ewan McKenzie being the fall guy. He stepped out of his job not much more than a year after Robbie Deans, a former All Black assistant coach and celebrated collector of Super Rugby winners medals, also made way, so it is looking at this point like Aussie rugby resembles Italian politics for the musical chairs being played by those in power.
Into McKenzie’s place came one Michael Cheika, who advertised the maverick side to his personality in a public way when he trashed the Kings Park coaching box when his Waratahs team lost to the Sharks in a Super Rugby match back in March.
Sure enough, although all the statements released afterwards expressly stated that Cheika wasn’t present at the time, the Wallabies were understood to have damaged a change-room at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin during Cheika’s first tour.
Clearly the Wallabies could be in for an interesting ride over the next few years.
The Wallabies will have to start doing their damage on the field though if their neighbours from across the Tasman Sea are going to be bothered by their presence.
And so to the world’s second best team - but also by some way stupidest - the Springboks. The first sign of madness is said to be when you try something over and over and it fails but you persist with it, somehow having the blind faith to expect a different result.
All those penalties that were kicked for touch rather than for the posts were surely an indication of lunacy within the Bok ranks, and it did cost them a few times too. It is true that the Boks scored a lot of tries from driving line-outs, but the conversion rate still didn’t justify the confidence that was shown when the kick for touch was opted for in place of an easy kick for posts when they were down by three points nearing half-time in the match against Ireland in Dublin.
It happened again later on the tour and it also nearly cost the Boks against Argentina in Pretoria and Australia in Cape Town during the Rugby Championship. So the award for stupidest team on the planet has a clear winner. Or it would if you focused just on what happens on the field, for those Wallabies are hard to beat for their shenanigans off it.
There was a point in the year where the Boks appeared to be moving forward and even looked destined to challenge the All Black supremacy on the playing side of things, but by the end of the November tour to Ireland, England, Italy and Wales, they had taken a step backwards and no longer looked like the harmonious squad they were during the home leg of the Rugby Championship.
Indeed, were it not for replacement flyhalf Patrick Lambie’s epic match-winning kick from his own half against the All Blacks at Ellis Park in October, the third year of Heyneke Meyer’s first World Cup cycle as coach might have mirrored the calamitous return of his predecessors Peter de Villiers and Jake White at a similar stage of their tenures.
When the Boks beat the All Blacks, and let’s not forget they came within a whisker of beating them on New Zealand soil a few weeks before that, it was seen as a significant moment as the overall win/loss ratio under Meyer was a good one and the Kiwis were the only team to have afflicted more damage on the Boks than the other way around.
Make no mistake, the record is still a good one, with Meyer still second behind the late Kitch Christie when it comes to win percentages of Bok coaches. However, the latter losses, and the apparent lack of clarity when it came to aspects of match strategy and selection, brought a different perspective, and dented the aura that was developing.
Injuries did offer opportunities to younger players, many of whom came through, and there were some brave selections, such as that of Handre Pollard, that Meyer should perhaps have been given more credit for. But in some areas, such as outside centre, it does appear that bad decisions made in the past might be catching up with the Boks.
In the end the Boks won nine out of 13 Test matches during the course of 2014, which was short of being the train smashes that 2006 and 2010 were, and there were some improvements, most notably to the conditioning, which enabled the Boks to outlast Australia at Newlands.
The Boks won some close games, some of them where they really came back from the dead, which seemed to suggest that Meyer’s call for greater mental strength to go with better conditioning was being answered.
Look at those close wins another way though and a more disturbing picture starts to emerge - the synopsis from the year could easily have been played 13, won six and lost seven. The late win over Wales in Nelspruit was aided by the referee and TMO, there was some fortune in the late rally that saw them beat Argentina in Salta, and the challenge on Schalk Burger that set up the Lambie match-winner against the Kiwis only came about because of a television replay.
That said, Meyer could justifiably argue that the Perth defeat to the Wallabies could easily have gone the other way, and probably would have had it not been for the unfortunate yellow carding of Bryan Habana.
That though, was also a game where the Bok stupidity came through, as well as some inexplicable schoolboy errors, and Morne Steyn’s missed touch kick from a penalty cost the Boks as much as the referee did.
At other levels of the game in South Africa, it was one weird year. The Sharks won the South African Super Rugby conference trophy for the first time under the coaching of Jake White, but they did so playing a style of rugby that was like watching paint dry, and it didn’t endear itself to fussy Kings Park patrons who have forgotten that the architect of their so-called running culture, Izak van Heerden, died 41 years ago.
The weirdest aspect of White’s tenure was his decision to take the job even though he wasn’t given the power to appoint his own assistant coaches, which should surely be a necessity in the modern era. It is understood that this was one of the sticking points that eventually saw White fall out with his former mate John Smit, now the Sharks CEO, and resign as director of rugby.
The Sharks have made a good appointment in Gary Gold but you get the impression that it is the people who work in the offices at Kings Park, and not those who get out on the grass and coach, who need to get their act together.
The Sharks have been on a downward spiral ever since Smit announced his arrival in his new role with the unceremonious and probably unnecessary axing of John Plumtree.
In Cape Town something at last seems to be stirring, with a disastrous start to the year in Super Rugby being arrested by the arrival of Gert Smal as director of rugby and culminating in a Currie Cup title. The game has been changed just enough to quieten all those moronic calls to “swing it” from the Newlands terraces, but with defence coach Jacques Nienaber leaving the Stormers system, time will tell whether there is justified optimism or whether the latest Currie Cup win was just another mirage like 2012.
There was an optimistic end to the year on a different front, with the Springbok Sevens team sounding off 2014 with two consecutive wins in the World Series. Now there is a team that is undeniably going places.
Player of the year: Duane Vermeulen
Domestic player of the year: Nizaam Carr
Comeback of the year: Victor Matfield
South African team of the year: Bok Sevens team that won the Commonwealth Games gold medal.
The Kevin Pietersen award for making friends: Kurtley Beale
The Damage to Property Award: Michael Cheika did a good job of redesigning the Kings Park coaching box.
The big question: How did Jake White accept the Sharks job when he didn’t have the power to appoint his own assistants?
The royal game question: How many coaching regimes will come and go at Kings Park with the same assistants being in place, and why are they seen as royal game?
The bottom line: Money isn’t as plentiful in South African rugby as the fans would hope it to be, and some unions, put purely and simply, just aren’t as well off now as they used to be.
International Coach of the Year: Joe Schmidt (Ireland).
South African Coach of the Year: Tie between Allister Coetzee and Johan Ackermann.
The Big Survivor Award: Frans Ludeke as Bulls coach.
The success story of the year: The Lions are making progress under the coaching of Johan Ackermann and the directorship of Sharks discard Rudolf Straeuli.
The Transformation Award: Some of the Sharks selections in the early part of the year, with S’bura Sithole playing centre and Lwazi Mvovo at fullback, were an example of some much needed thinking outside of the box.
Best Decision of the Year: WP’s appointment of Gert Smal as director of rugby.
Houdini Act of 2014: UCT's come from nowhere win in the last minutes of the Varsity Cup final.
Weekend Argus