Where has all the skill gone?
Graeme Wepener, a coach at SACS, expresses concern about the playing state of South African rugby, and he is not alone in his concern.
At the end of a tumultuous week for South African Rugby there are as ever many talking points. The Boks beat England playing their predictable crash-bash, box-kicking gameplan. The got the result they and the country wanted and everybody walked away reasonably happy and so we might.
Of grave concern is the fact that one of the best rugby footballers in the world is forced into playing a gameplan completely foreign to him; François Hougaard stacking players in a worm-like formation at the back of a ruck and the hoofing the ball into the Durban sky (the new five-second law for letting the ball lie at the back on a ruck can't come soon enough). Six days previously we saw the same benign tactics used in Stellenbosch by the Baby Boks. Young men, no doubt eager to run with the ball and enjoy themselves, asked to play a stifling pattern in the name of winning. And surprise, surprise they lost!
We pride ourselves on having the best schoolboy rugby teams and players in the world. There can be no doubt that it is the most competitive schoolboy structure but therein lies the problem. The win at all costs mentality is killing us. We coach to structure brilliantly but very rarely focus on individual skills and even more rarely allow players the opportunity to showcase them.
The best teams in the country are not the ones that necessarily contain the players with the best skills but the ones with the biggest, most physically intimidating athletes who execute their game-plan (usually based on physicality and gain-line dominance) the most clinically.
Watching New Zealand run riot against the Irish one can't help but understand why so many South Africans support them. They play rugby the way it should be played. Of course they have structure, you have to have it given how organised modern defences are and how good almost every player in the world is at getting over and stealing (jackling) ball, but they use the width of the field and back their skills and flair to unlock defences. Why don’t we?
The reason we don’t and can’t is because the players generally have not been coached the skills or have had the skill coached out of them. I am guilty of it myself and having watched this week’s rugby am going to once again look at why I started coaching and begin doing things differently, even if it means moving back to junior school or Under-14 level and building boys' skills from the bottom up.
Let’s us as coaches try and empower players to play the greatest game in the world the way it should be played instead of turning them into structure driven robot intent only on winning.
By Graeme Wepener
