In the pre isolation years South Africa played 174 Tests winning 112 Tests, drawing 15 Tests and losing 47 Tests. With an overall win rate of 64%

Country, played, wins, losses, draws, win percentage, points for, points against.                                              

In comparison South Africa in the post isolation years have played 217 Tests winning 135, drawing 4 and losing 78 Tests. With an overall win percentage of 62%

Country, played, wins, losses, draws, win percentage, points for, points against.

On face value, it seems that we are as successful in post isolation as what we were in pre isolation, but reading these statistics at face value only is similar to judging a book by its cover.

There many more teams playing test rugby these days, and most of the new comers are strictly amateur in their setup, hence it flatters our statistics, I have there for taken the statistics of those countries playing professional rugby and compared that to the pre isolation amateur era.

Country                , played, wins, losses, draws, win percentage, points for, points against

The statistics against the countries that have professional players reads 195 tests, 113 wins, 78 losses and 4 draws. With a win percentage of 58%

The countries that have “caught up” with South Africa during the last 18 years are:

Australia who in modern times have gone past us, New Zealand who has rocketed past us, England who dominated us as recent as 2006, France who has been dominating us in recent times and even Wales has received their first win against us.

It is interesting to see that teams that struggled to win more than 1 out of 4 matches against us, has in the modern era been so much more competitive and successful.

I want to discuss the reasons behind this, and the usual suspects would be infrastructure, player base, coaching, administrations and the stubborn way in which we cling to our way of playing.

Infrastructure

With our schools rugby the envy of most countries and the Craven Week unique in it’s setup in the world, it is clear that at school level there seems little wrong with our grass root development, until you realise that perhaps as many as 50% of our schools do not even have the basic requirements to play rugby, most of the traditional “black” schools do not have the facilities and/or attitude to want to play rugby.

I have been out of the loop in club rugby for a good 18 years, but even in my day playing for a second division club like Edenvale there was no coaching worth mentioning, a club like Wanderers in those days would have sufficient money to at least compensate their first team players. I can only imagine that fewer clubs these days are breeding grounds for provincial teams. I contacted Boland rugby union a few months to find out how accurate the data bases are in regards to registered clubs and players and found it totally farcical with the lady at Boland rugby union telling me they have in excess of 100 clubs. Now surely 90% of them must be a social club who would not even posses a piece of land to play on.

Of the 14 Provincial teams that we have, it is clear that 9 of these teams do not have sufficient money to retain any good players and even the Cheetahs who has been one of our breeding grounds for South African rugby cannot compete with the likes of the Sharks, Bulls and Stormers when it comes to retaining players.

This season has been an eye opener in terms of the quality of rugby that the Pumas, Leopards and Griquas have been playing and even the Lions seems to be on the up.

Coaching

It has become very clear to me that we are in serious need of some world class coaches and the example of the Lions contracting John Mitchell just confirms that if our Back line coach of the Springboks could not develop the Lions sufficiently to win one match in the super 14, and has the record for conceding the most tries, it is clear that John Mitchell is a much better coach and has shown his credentials by having immediate success with the Lions.

Administration

Our administration is currently the laughing stock of the world, NZ and Australia has had very little trouble in convincing SARU to split the television revenue earned through the SANZAR contracts evenly, even though we have by far the biggest television audience. In fact they have been intimidated to such an extent that they want to look for alternative avenues and other partners as I am sure they can’t see how they will get back the respect that must have been lost from their SANZAR partners. SARU also does not seem to have the ability to manage PDV and his public outbursts or his poor performances, let alone set up a workable plan to rest and condition players.

How do we fix this?

It is not going to be easy, and certainly is not an overnight fix. At a grass roots level government is going to have to step in and get the Minister of education or sport involved in setting up a 5 to 10 year plan on how they will introduce and set up the required facilities in schools, how they will implement rugby in these traditional “black” schools, and infuse a rugby culture. If necessary get an outside company to be funded by government and let them execute and monitor progress.

Our clubs need a revamp, provinces should earmark the clubs with most potential to become breeding grounds and be fed from schools in their district, it is also vital to have club representatives visit these schools and recruit the rugby players as I believe this is a major loss of talent that simply disappears out of our systems. We cannot continue to have our Provinces only recruit from elite rugby schools and Craven weeks.

Although we do have an under 21 provincial competition, I am certain that most of these players come from these schools and Craven week.

Coaching, it might be an opportunity for SARU to setup a coaching academy that can educate and intensify the development of coaches who can ultimately become provincial and national coaches.

Perhaps if we have better coaches the basic skill sets required to play a wider faster game will outweigh this belief that the way we play rugby is our only strength.

But at the end of the day, the buck stops with our rugby administration, they seem to be so busy with their in fighting and corporate politics whilst trying to also be seen as being politically correct that the ambitions of the individual is now far more important than the development of South African rugby.

The writing is on the wall, it is time for either the South African rugby public to demand that these issues be addressed from grass root level all the way to the top of SARU, we are a Country with a love and passion for rugby second to none, we have a proud history and record for more than a hundred years. We have untapped talent in 75% of our population that now 16 years after our first democratic election has yet to be effectively developed. We have the potential not only to be number one in the world, but with the required actions can dominate world rugby.

As a nation we are physically strong and genetically built for this game, there should be no way that NZ with less than 5 million population should have the upper hand over us.

The time is now, and we need to make government aware that they have as much a responsibility in developing rugby in South Africa, and no amount of quotas will make this the number one sport in SA, if we don’t get the other 75% of our population to play the game.