Ken Borland

It will be a learning experience all round for South African rugby as Allister Coetzee was confirmed as the new Springbok coach on Tuesday.

Even though Coetzee is probably the most experienced coach to have been given the Springbok job, the 52-year-old said it will still be a time for growth for him, while the players will need to adapt to the many changes in the game, and South African rugby as a whole will have to undergo a mindset change in terms of transformation.

Coetzee, an outstanding scrumhalf, was the captain of the South African non-racial team before unity and played Currie Cup and SuperRugby for Eastern Province from 1992-1996, as well as representing the Junior Springboks.

He then turned his hand to coaching, first as an assistant coach for Eastern Province and then the Sharks. Coetzee coached the Emerging Springboks in 1998 and the SA U23 and SA A sides in 2000, before becoming one of the assistant coaches under Harry Viljoen.

He was Eastern Province head coach from 2001 to 2003, before joining the World Cup-winning management team of Jake White in 2004, alongside Gert Smal. From 2008 he was the head coach of Western Province and then the Stormers from 2010, winning three South African SuperRugby conference titles and two Currie Cups.

“Who is ever ready for this sort of job? I will continue to grow, as I always have, we all grow into something like this. My strength is aligning people, get them working in the same direction. Unity is a massive thing and it’s about how I instil that in the team, in the management and with Saru, as well as giving the country ownership of the team.

“Is Test rugby about entertaining? The big challenge initially will be winning Tests, getting all the boxes ticked before June, we need to get the best 23 players. The game has evolved and so have coaches and it would be really naïve to ignore that. When we embarked on our winning culture with the Stormers, we put teams under pressure through our defence and kicking game, but there’s more than one way of putting teams under pressure, you need attack too.

“It’s about the integration of a balanced game and it took time with the Stormers to not just defend a lead. But it’s great to see the awareness of all the SuperRugby coaches that we need to brush up on attack, it’s about speed of hand, ball and decision-making, and communication skills are vital as well. You can see the SuperRugby coaches are already busy with that,” Coetzee said.

“Transformation is also a reality; it’s not about numbers, it’s about how you think. It wasn’t an issue for me at the Stormers, I didn’t put asterisks down on the team-sheet when I chose the side saying this guy is a player of colour. Rugby has been played in all communities for more than a hundred years, so they all have hopes and it’s about making sure those pathways are open.”

Alongside Coetzee in the chairs at the front of the team photo will be former Springbok Sevens star Mzwandile Stick, who has been appointed as an assistant coach.

“Sticks is a rugby man, the picture of professionalism. He’s a confident guy, he was head coach of the champion Eastern Province U19 team, he’s coached at Currie Cup level and now at Super Rugby as well. He’s got great potential and it’s part of my duty to bring him through,” Coetzee said.

Although the new Springbok coach said he is looking at around 60 players at the moment, he said he would be including about 40 in his planning closer to the three Tests against Ireland in June.

South African fast bowling great Allan Donald believes a staid attack was the Proteas’ biggest problem in their failed ICC World T20 campaign in India.

“The batting was mostly wonderful, but where we lacked was in our bowling – there was no serious x-factor in the attack, that was missing and you could see it a mile away. There was a lack of imagination with the ball.

“That’s a serious team that went over there but one thing it lacked, if we analyse it honestly, was x-factor. When it came to crunch time with the ball, we couldn’t come up with something while other teams always found a way and there was some amazing death bowling in the tournament.

“We just couldn’t seem to find that way to step up during the big moments, which was particularly heartbreaking against England. We needed someone able to change the course of the game, that’s what we were missing,” Donald told The Citizen.

South Africa’s former bowling coach wondered whether Dale Steyn, the one fast bowler with the skill and prior experience of turning games around, should rather have just stayed at home given that he only bowled six overs in the tournament.

“Why does Dale play so little if you take him to the world cup, I didn’t quite get that. You choose a guy after one club game but then you hardly use him, as a champion fast bowler should you not back him?

“Kagiso Rabada is still a puppy, Chris Morris is making his way, he’s learning but is an exciting prospect. But that x-factor ability to change games comes with experience, you have to have the nous, the ability to suss the game out, see what’s going to happen four or five overs ahead of time, like a Shane Warne or Glenn McGrath for example,” Donald said.

As a recent member of the Proteas management, Donald said he did not want to carp about the performance of coach Russell Domingo.

“The coach has to make some tough selection decisions and Russell is quite smart in what he wants, he’s quite astute and has a good understanding of the game. I’m not going to give him heaps when it’s the team that hasn’t produced the goods. It’s very tough for a coach in those circumstances, it’s the toughest job in the world when things go wrong. Russell has enough on his plate dealing with all those pressures,” Donald said.

All the critics are going to town on Russell Domingo following yet another Proteas failure at a world cup, but the coach himself is defiant that he should not be drummed out of his position at the helm of South Africa’s cricket team.

“I wouldn’t say our form has been bad for 18 months, it’s just the last four or five months, since the India Tests. The ODIs against India were good and the ODIs and T20s against England were good.

“We just did not play the big moments well enough. But my opinion is that our preparation was outstanding, spot on, I can assure you everyone worked extremely hard, we were meticulous in our planning and strategising. It’s part of my job, absolutely, to try and make it happen, to make it all come together, and my impression is that the team does buy into my approach.

“Of course I want to continue in my job and I will just work hard and try and get the best out of the players. I have a good relationship with them and in my opinion our management team is as good as anything in the world,” Domingo said.

South Africa’s premature exit at the ICC World T20 is now the subject of a Cricket South Africa review and CEO Haroon Lorgat, who has previously been a solid backer of Domingo, stopped short of giving him unqualified support. Six months ago, Domingo received a contract extension through to the end of April next year from CSA.

Whether CSA will be satisfied with Domingo eking out results until then remains to be seen, but the man in the firing line does not feel he should go.

“The margins in international cricket are very small and there’s just a tiny difference in making the semi-finals or not. Look at India getting out of jail against Bangladesh. There will always be questions after you fall out of an event like that, but small things just didn’t go for us,” Domingo said.

It would be naïve to think, after all the dramatic revelations this week of just how far the tentacles of the Guptas have infiltrated into practically every organ of state, that sport in this country is okay. Never mind football’s problems now that Fifa have named South Africa as being complicit in bribery.

Sports Minister Razzmatazz may just want to carry on partying and living the life, hoping it all just goes away (“Fifa must retract”, have you ever?), but the government’s ability to make things just disappear doesn’t work so well in overseas courts.

And cricket could face another day of reckoning once it is exposed just how thoroughly Cricket South Africa sold out to the Guptas. It was a few years ago, but many of those same, morally deficient administrators are still on the board.

As with so many of CSA’s problems, it all started with the IPL South Africa hosted in 2009. Initially it all looked okay, a wonderful jamboree of cricket brought to our shores. But it didn’t take long for the sordid underside of the tournament to become visible.

Such a billion dollar event was obviously going to be irresistible to the rapacious Guptas and their fingers had to be in the pie. The Family (ironically, this is how they are known in cricket circles) were involved in the assault of a man in the Wanderers Long Room and when the police were called they were instructed by the Guptas to arrest the victim. It is believed he was subsequently deported.

The IPL was moved to South Africa due to security concerns surrounding the Indian general election, and the South African government instituted a requirement that anyone travelling from troubled areas of India to the tournament would have to undergo a 30-day security clearance process. But when all the Guptas’ friends from Uttar Pradesh wanted to come over for the IPL final, this requirement was mysteriously waived for them, allegedly on the instruction of the family.

A leading administrator of the time says “Many cricket administrators colluded with the Guptas, like the politicians. The Guptas controlled the administrators and Gerald Majola, especially, was their man. He was the means to their control and so, when we were fighting him, we were actually fighting the Guptas.”

Little wonder then that, when some board members, with the support of then BCCI president Shashank Manohar, called for clarity as to how the amount of R400 million paid to CSA for the tournament was spent, there was a furious response from other directors and KPMG were prevented from doing an audit.

There is no doubt there was a you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours relationship between CSA and the Guptas. The Guptas even had their family spokesman, Gary Naidoo, sitting on the board.

When Majola was finally removed from office, his successor, Jacques Faul, faced a vicious onslaught from The New Age, the Gupta newspaper.

Board members have often been invited to Saxonwold and in return the Guptas are used to being treated like royalty at cricket matches, demanding their own tables and such like. The Guptas invited the CSA board to 2010 soccer World Cup games and CSA had board meetings in the family’s R50 000 a day penthouse at the luxurious Oyster Box in Umhlanga Rocks. Security measures that have been in place for everyone else attending matches, including top CSA administrators, have been waived for the Guptas because they refused to comply.

No one seems to know for sure how much per annum stadiums like Willowmoore Park, Newlands and Kingsmead received for Sahara [the Guptas’ computer company, they even “borrowed” the name of the more famous Indian version] getting the naming rights; but the talk is it was a negligible amount.

The finger has also been pointed at TV broadcasters, with a schools cricket game at St David’s being shown live in prime time; co-incidentally one of the Gupta sons was playing.

Cricket administrators also speak of the build-up to the IPL when they were told by the Guptas not to bother keeping then sports minister Makhenkesi Stofile informed of proceedings because “we have been to the cabinet kgotla and he won’t be sports minister for long”. That’s another thing Fikile Mbalula has to answer for, given his denials about how he was put in his post in the first place.

The day is hopefully coming soon when South Africa is rid of this parasitic family, whose presence must become as unpopular as e-toll gantries given how they have sucked the blood of the people along with their corrupt accomplices.