Durban - When the words were coming out of Jacques Nienaber’s mouth, I grimaced and knew that the Springbok coach was tempting fate ...
“If you are a coach or a player, you are two poor games from being dropped, and you are two poor games away from being fired. That is the reality and one lives with that,” Nienaber said during a media conference a few days after his team had smashed the All Blacks in Nelspruit, and he had been asked by a New Zealand reporter if he felt sorry for coach Ian Foster.
Well, the Boks lost that week at Ellis Park after getting their selections wrong and going through the motions for the opening quarter, and they were 15-0 down before they had raised a sweat.
Most thought they would bounce back in Adelaide.
They usually play better after a loss and for months they had been talking about destroying the hoodoo of losing in Australia – only for them to play even worse.
They were outplayed and outcoached and suddenly Nienaber is sitting in the same rocky boat as Foster.
The Boks have won 50% of their games this year and overall, Nienaber’s win percentage has dropped below 60%.
Since Nienaber swapped seats with Rassie Erasmus, the Boks have won 58% of their 19 matches to date, which translates into 11 victories and eight defeats.
This damning win ratio reminds me of how often Nienaber has said that that he will never compromise the Boks’ chances of winning a Test match (with his selections).
“The main thing must stay the main thing” has been the chief mantra of the Boks since Rassie took over ... except that it is not the case this year.
Look, I know what they are trying to do in terms of growing depth as part of a bigger picture that leads to the Rugby World Cup in France in a year’s time, and that if the Boks win the World Cup nobody is going to care about these painful losses in 2022.
The problem I have is that by overly concentrating on what is going to happen in a World Cup year, you lose focus on the here and now.
Surely the best preparation for a World Cup is winning momentum?
Success breeds success. Pick your best team for every game, and win at all costs, while evolving your gameplan to stay ahead of the opposition.
If you take winning momentum into a World Cup, the actual event looks after itself.
The most worrying thing for me is not actually the selections but the failure to grow the Boks’ attacking game. They actually tried to run the ball against the Wallabies at the weekend but drifted across the field too often, and there was an occasion when they had a five-on-three overlap and Handre Pollard tried to kick a 50-22 (unsuccessfully), when simply running straight and passing would have resulted in a run-in for the wing.
The beauty of Ireland’s series win over the All Blacks was the masterful manner in which they constructed their attacks.
The Bok backs just cannot attack space in the same manner. They rely on individual flair and that is about it, and often that is not enough.