You are so fickle
By the time South Africa wins the World Cup I fear so much damage would have been done to the prestige of international rugby that the victory would be meaningless.
Already we have had to put up with the embarrassments of last year – a 49-nil drubbing by Australia and a big joke of an end-of-season tour that included losses to Ireland and an average English side – and now mastermind coach Jake White is resting his players again for an important pair of fixtures that will end something like two months before the World Cup begins.
And what is more, he is doing this with the seemingly full backing of the South African rugby public.
Give us a break, won’t you?
Was it not the self-same masses who were calling for White’s head last year?
I fear some Super 14 success is going to everybody’s head, as one is only snarled at when one questions White’s ambitions, with an arrogantly put, “What will you say when we win the World Cup?”
White has been quoted as saying that a World Cup win is everything to South African rugby, as testified to by the national impact the 1995 triumph had upon the country.
But how the landscape of rugby has changed since 1995.
The advent of professionalism has corroded the value of international sport slowly until supporters don’t care about current results and the importance of the integrity of always in good faith selecting your country’s best fifteen players to wear the national colours has seemingly vanished.
Anybody who says it is okay to play players who aren’t the best for the sake of a greater good must honestly never complain about quotas again.
It’s the same philosophy at work in both cases except that at least the bid for transformation has a goal of extending a sport to a wider group of people whilst fake selections only has money, cheap trophies and one man’s individual plan as its goal and its motivation.
Somebody wrote in to Rugby365 that Chris Waldburger should not question South African rugby as it won’t have a positive affect on the players.
The moment players and management assume the responsibility of representing a national body, and start getting paid literally millions of rands to do it, they must then stand accountable before the media and the public.
And they must, and will, be questioned.
No international coach has ever rested his players from a major competition.
White is the first.
New Zealand rested their players from the entertainment of the Super 14, and Australia has not rested their players at all.
Most of White’s key players were rested in the fixture against Samoa if not in that dreadful tour at the end of last year.
Instead of creating more fixtures before the World Cup as warm-ups, why not actually play your best against New Zealand and Australia?
Graham Henry has fashioned an All Black squad that can rotate and not lose any strength when they do choose to give tired players a rest. And even that form of resting players is still based on good faith, because it is done with the honest intention of keeping the starting line-up at full strength.
White has not been able to fashion a squad system similar to that of Henry’s.
And even if his B-squad does fight above its weight in the next weeks, he still would have acted in bad faith, and credit can only be given to those players who have gutsed it out on the field of play, despite being brandished as B-Springboks by their coach.
The question to the rugby public is this: At what price must the World Cup come?
Surely there are some things not up for sale.
But then again, in this era in which the seemingly contradictory ideals of professionalism and sport live together, nothing is certain anymore.
By Chris Waldburger
