rub of the green column

RUB OF THE GREEN by my mate Mike Greenaway a fun read .

ONE of my favourite P Divvy quotes – and boy is he the most quotable rugby coach ever – is the one before the Boks lost 0-19 to the All Blacks in Cape Town and he tuned: “If you look at the Bible and see how Joseph got out of the pit and ended up in the palace – well between the pit and the palace there was a moerse lot of kak.”

Except the Boks under Peter de Villiers are spending more time in the “kak” than they should be given the pedigree of the players, their experience and the winning culture that De Villiers inherited.

This column is not going to venture into discussing De Villiers’ capabilities as a coach but will rather look at the environment for the poor old Boks that the foot-in-mouth coach perpetuates through his refusal to listen to instructions from his bosses and follow the time honoured dictum of coaches the world over: “Less is more.”

I was at the press conference at the Shimlas Rugby Club on Monday when De Villiers held court, pumped up like a bantam cock following the Boks’ win at Loftus Versfeld. He shot the breeze on any number of subjects and then, totally unsolicited, pinned the Springbok colours to the Bees Roux mast: “we back him 100 percent, not the deed but the circumstances leading up to it.”

Why bring it up? Nobody at the press conference was going to link the Roux tragedy to the Springboks because it had no relevance to the Boks and their preparations to play the Wallabies. But P Divvy, cock-a-hoop as he always is when the Boks have won, could not help himself and offered his opinion on the matter.

You could almost hear the groans at the South African Rugby Union. If only it could be calculated how much time and energy has been sunk into putting out De Villiers’ bonfires …

So much effort to nullify so much idiocy and, the most concerning thing of all, is the repeat offending – what was that quote about “the sure sign of lunacy being the repeating of the same behaviour while expecting a different result?”

De Villiers we know has been rapped over the knuckles again and again and again since he took over from Jake White in January 2008, but still he cannot stop bringing South African rugby into disrepute.

His riposte has been the simplistic and bombastic: “I’m a God-given talent, I’m the best I can ever be. So what you think doesn’t bother me. I know what I am and I don’t give a damn."

Well the rest of us South Africans do give a damn and De Villiers needs to realise that the Springboks are not his property to embarrass as he pleases, but the pride of the country and rational-minded supporters do not care for his flippant and sometimes despairingly obtuse comments.

Last year, it is known that sponsors Sasol complained about the mockery De Villiers made of the Springboks with his comments in the wake of the alleged eye-gouging incident involving Schalk Burger in the second Test against the British and Irish lions.

There was talk of “tutus” and taking the Boks to ballet lessons; there was racist talk too when he tried to explain his selection of Ricky Januarie: “What I have learned in South Africa is, if you take your car to a garage and the owner is black, and they mess it up, you never go back to that garage. If the owner is white, you say oh sorry, they made a mistake and you go back again.”

Well why do we keep going back to Peter de Villiers when he clearly is a liability to the image of the game in our country? Never mind whether he can coach or not, he continually embarrasses the Springboks and his country, despite numerous instructions from his bosses to watch what he says.

The answer lies in our complex racial history. We are hesitant to comment negatively on the shortcomings of a black man.

But in Australia and New Zealand, they don’t have our prejudicial background and they call it as they see it. Ask former All Black Craig Dowd and former Wallaby Brendan Cannon.

http://www.iol.co.za