Time to take ownership of how wasteful we are 0
Bulls coach John Mitchell’s comments this week about how he is going to set about changing the entire model of how the franchise recruits and develops players reinforces the belief that South African rugby as a whole needs to take ownership of the fact that we are extremely wasteful when it comes to our talent.
The fact that we have so much rugby talent in this country is both a blessing and a curse. The downside of being so well-endowed with athletes is that very little attention is paid to putting systems in place that will get the best out of young players.
One gets the feeling that the current approach of our franchises’ recruitment officers is to just try and buy up as much talent as possible at Craven Week, let nature run its course and hope one or two of them turn into stars.
Contrast this with a country like Australia where rugby union has a small portion of the talent ‘pie’ and whatever players they have, they have to fully invest in them and maximise their potential. Jake White used to joke that if prop Bill Young, who played 46 times for Australia, had to pitch up at Stellenbosch University they would have sent him to the third XV straight away. But the point was that Young was ‘made’ into a solid Test front-ranker, whereas in South Africa he probably would have just disappeared.
By focusing on quantity and not quality, and by just worrying about who is going to play in the provincial U19 and U21 sides rather than developing the actual skills of the players, South Africa have come to the point where their SuperRugby squads are made up of many players who are not good enough to play in the competition, according to Mitchell, a former All Blacks coach.
Rugby in this country needs to stop being so insular and needs to be open to world trends, including those in other sports.
Even I, who usually uses watching football as a sleeping pill, have been impressed by many aspects of the Soccer World Cup and have been thinking how these could translate into the world of rugby union.
By staging a brilliant counter-attack to beat Japan at the death, Belgium produced a magnificent passage of play that was reminiscent of some of the superb tries scored by the All Blacks in recent years.
Any sports lover would have been impressed by Romelu Lukaku’s brilliant running off the ball and his dummy that set up Belgium’s winner; the lesson for rugby players was that often you can have more impact through what you do without the ball than with it.
And the image of football fans as being hooligans has been challenged by the splendid Japanese and Senegalese fans, who embody all that is good about sport, and they even cleaned up afterwards!
I have also been watching hockey this week and their new interpretations surrounding the use of the aerial ball or overhead might provide some help to rugby lawmakers currently grappling with the ball-in-the-air issues that are bedevilling their game.
Hockey have simplified the whole issue by basically saying whoever is under the ball has all the rights and cannot be played until they have the ball under control. Perhaps if the defender under the ball in rugby had similar protection it would limit kicks to being into space only and would eliminate all the aerial contests that are proving so difficult to control.
https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/the-citizen-kzn/20180707/282282436055423