Get our rugby players' axes sharp, before they tackle the trees

There’s been a bit of lively debate from the keyboard crusaders following my endorsement of Dan Retief’s views in his excellent piece entitled SA’s junior talent drying up?

https://www.alloutrugby.com/sas-junior-talent-drying/

Retief bemoans the poor performance, again, of the under-20s at the recent world champs, and concludes that, in the handful of schools that those players come from, they are not learning the things that will make them “perfectly rounded players possessing the mental and physical abilities to be the best over a sustained period of time.”

We South African’s tend to believe that our rugby players are bigger, stronger, more physical and more aggressive than anyone else’s. Retief points out that that isn’t actually the case anymore, but our top schools strive to make their players fit that mould anyway. And if they don’t have the material to do that, they scour the land and buy it from other schools somewhere else.

Hardly, I and others have been on and on about, the formula for sustained rugby success.

Those who have been commenting on this have pointed to the success of our top schools against international opposition, and have explained what it is that the New Zealand schools do. Rugby at a top five school is a serious business and it should be treated that way, one of them wrote.

Of course it is, and of course it should be. But if winning games and rising to the top of the rankings is the dominant value that underpins their operation then, I believe, they are doing us a disservice.

It was Abraham Lincoln, apparently, who said “give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." It’s led to an oft-quoted business principle referring to the need to get what you need to get the job done in order, before you rush in and try to do the work.

Here’s a sports coaching analogy. Swimming coaches spend hours on drills to get their swimmers' technique right. They make them wear flippers – not to make the go faster, but to allow them to keep going forward while they work, in fine detail, on their stroke – they don’t, these days, concentrate on strength, stamina and mental attitude alone.

Sure, at junior level the strongest, fittest and most bloody-minded swimmers will win races, but you need to learn the basics if you want to be good in the long run.

The South African rugby game plan is based on physical domination, on effective kick-chasing and brutal defence. It’s what won us two World Cups and I agree with those who say we will never beat the All Blacks by playing an expansive, open game.

The problem is that the All Black are better than us at the physical game too, and they have the skills to use the opportunities that come their way to score tries out wide.

The answer to Retief’s question is no – there is still plenty of talent. We are just expecting them to play South African rugby at school level without teaching them the skills that a good rugby player needs to have before he is taught to play any style at all.

We are expecting them to chop down the trees without taking the time to ensure that their axes are sharp enough to do so.

School rugby is no longer our strength

There has, predictably, been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth following the exit of yet another supremely talented SA under-20 team from the World Rugby under-20 championships this week.

The keyboard cowboys have been all over the social media, looking for someone to blame. The consensus seems to be that the team was poorly coached although a good number blamed transformation and the quota system, of course.

Now, I’ve been known to whinge with the best of them and my complaints have nothing to do with transformation. I’m just dismayed at how we have allowed our greatest advantage – our school rugby set up – become our greatest weakness while all the while the so-called boffins praise the professionalisation of rugby at school level and wax lyrical about the top 10 rated schools in the land.

 

There was an eloquent description of what’s going on in schools rugby on the Daily Maverick site by Zac Elkin this week.

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2018-06-11-a-fork-in-the-road-is-coming-for-south-african-school-rugby/amp/

He says what many of us have been saying for the past two or three years, but it’s a timely reminder, as the Junior Boks bomb out again, that school rugby is not as healthy as we all think it is. He makes the point that the emergence of a limited number super schools is killing the game because their historical rivals are disappearing.

Elite sport is about exceptional individuals, we all know that. But it’s also a numbers game. The broader the base of the pyramid the higher the apex will be. That’s why Georgia, who have some impressive rugby specimens in their under-20 team, will never threaten New Zealand or England at senior levels. They simply don’t have enough players to be good across the board.

We used to have that in our schools rugby. We have some great athletes, great coaches and teams that play great rugby, but there are way fewer schools and players in total. There’s an explanation for the failure of our age group teams – remember that the under-18s were whitewashed in a series involving England France and Wales last year as well.

And you really do have to look at coaching. Last year former Springbok captain André Vos, tweeting after the Springboks were thrashed by New Zealand, wrote that the problem with SA rugby begins at school level.

“Crash-ball, pod rugby taught at schools is destroying the game in SA. They don't get taught spacial (sic) awareness and decision making skills,” he said.

He is exactly right, and many of us have been saying it for a while now. The best coaches in the land are at the schools, no question about that, and they are coaching with a professional attitude. Winning is the only thing that matters, so they are under pressure to produce teams that win and climb up the rankings. They don’t see it as their responsibility to develop a large base of players who have mastered the basic skills of the game, and who are at the appropriate level of skill and physiological development for their ages.

The top coaches are accumulators of talent, they don’t develop it. The best available talent is concentrated in those few “super schools” and the teams are coached, very effectively, to win games. That means perfecting the style of play that Vos describes: crash-ball, pod rugby. Why change a winning formula? The coach creates a team that wins and he sticks to a rigid game plan that guarantees success.

The performance of our national teams have shown that there’s more to it than that. Some called André Vos daft, but he is right. Spatial awareness and decision-making is lacking in many of our top players. If players are taught to set pods, and to create targets for forwards to drive into, then they are taught to focus on the 10 metres directly in front of them, and they aren’t aware of space.

And if the coach demands that they stick to the game plan because that’s what brings success, then they never learn to decide for themselves. That’s why the under-20s found themselves 20 points down in a wink of an eye against France, and England.

Is it why the Springboks were in a similar predicament last weekend? You decide for yourself.