Boks are work in progress rather than title contenders for Rugby Championship 2013

THE Springboks are into their second year now under coach Heyneke Meyer and while they are better prepared than last year, they are still very much a work in progress and some way off being genuine Rugby Championship contenders.

This time last year, Meyer had not been long in the job and expressed his frustrations that his management team could only take up their positions until a week before the Boks’ first match, the first Test against England on June 9 in Durban. The staff he wanted had been contracted to provincial franchises and he only got his backroom team together on the Monday of that first Test of 2012.

The Boks won that match, as well as the Test the following week in Johannesburg against the same opponents before drawing the third Test in the series against England in Port Elizabeth, and Meyer was reasonably satisfied that his brand new team had seen off the English without a defeat.

The Rugby Championship later that year gave Meyer a gage of how far his team had come, given that the nucleus of the Springbok team had moved on after the 2011 Rugby World Cup, and the results were sobering but not altogether depressing for the coach that had guided the Bulls to three Super Rugby titles.

There was an emphatic defeat of Argentina in Cape Town, which will also be remembered for the catastrophic knee injury to hooker Bismarck du Plessis, but the next week in Mendoza, the Boks were terrible and late in the match salvaged a draw thanks to an intercept try.

The away defeats to Australia and New Zealand were anticipated for a fledgling team, and then came a 31-8 smashing of the Wallabies in Pretoria only for the All Blacks to then bring Meyer’s young Bok team back to earth with a superb performance in a match played in the township of Soweto.

In 2013, after June international wins in South Africa over Scotland, Italy and Samoa, Meyer is cautiously optimistic ahead of the Rugby Championship.

“We are further down than the road than we were last year,” Meyer said. “Last year was really tough because we had so little time for a new squad of players to adjust to a new management team. Now, we have our systems in place, and we are entering the next phase of our development.

“So yes, we are more settled as a coaching staff and we are working towards growing the team, but this is obviously a dynamic process as you try and find a balance between bringing through new players while keeping enough experience to guide the team through the championships you aspire to win while building towards the next World Cup.”

As was the case last year, the Boks have a dual assignment against Argentina to start their campaign and this time it will be a highly emotive match for the Boks because it will be part of a unique day designed to celebrate the life of former South African president Nelson Mandela, who is critically ill.

The Boks were supposed to play this first match in Bloemfontein on August 17 but when the 95-year-old Mandela was admitted to intensive care at a hospital, the government, in conjunction with relevant authorities in rugby and soccer, came up with the novel idea of the Nelson Mandela Sports Day, which will have an unprecedented draw card of South Africa’s national soccer team playing a match in Johannesburg against Burkina Faso as the curtain-raiser to the Springboks versus Pumas game.

The Boks then move to Mendoza for a return match against an Argentina side that, at the same venue in 2012, came within a few minutes of beating the Boks for the first time in their history.

Their next match is in Brisbane, the Boks’ ultimate bogey ground – they have not won in Queensland since 1971 – before moving onto Eden Park, another venue which is not a happy hunting ground for the Boks, and they then finish against the Wallabies in Cape Town and against New Zealand at Ellis Park, an intimidating stadium that has often proved tricky for the Kiwis.

But will it be a game that could decide the Championship?

Probably not in that Meyer, by his own admission, is still building a team and after the clear-out of 2011 he is not planning a peak until 2015.

In the June internationals, Meyer confounded critics that have labelled him “conservative” by introducing electric Cheetahs fullback Willie le Roux, a devastating runner from the back that hits the line and creates opportunities in the manner of Israel Dagg.

The Cheetahs have been the revelation of the South African Super Rugby challenge and for the first time in their history made the play-offs, and their captain, Adriaan Strauss now finds himself ahead of world class hooker Bismarck du Plessis, and Le Roux is now the fullback ahead of the Bulls’ incumbent, Zane Kirchner, a player who is safe at the back but does not set the world on fire.

So Meyer is confounding the critics that say he can only play “boring’ Bulls smash-and-bash rugby.

“I am open to selecting form players, whatever style of rugby they play,” Meyer says. “I want Super Rugby players to know that the door is open and that they will be rewarded, and that we will forge our challenge as we go forward.

“And it is going to take time and educated experimentation before we settle on the winning formula,” Meyer said. “And we have to do this under the obvious South African expectation that we must win every Test. But we are getting there, and now in year two we must build on year one. Of course we want to win the Rugby Championship, but we cannot hope to do that if we don’t first build on the foundations of our first year together.”

by Mike Greenaway