Jimmy Stonehouse
Former Steval Pumas coach Jimmy Stonehouse, 1 of the country’s most undervalued coaches, is rumoured to have thrown his name into the hat for vacant coaching positions at the Cell C Sharks, Vodacom Bulls and Southern Kings.
4 Of South Africa’s franchises will be looking to fill their vacant head coach positions before the start of the revamped and extended Super Rugby tournament in 2016.
Stonehouse took up a coaching job with Japanese club Toshiba Brave Lupus earlier this year after he declined 2 previous offers from abroad with the hope of landing a job with a South African franchise.
The Bulls head coach position opened up over the weekend when Frans Ludeke resigned after 8 years in charge of South Africa’s most successful Super Rugby franchise.
The Southern Kings put out feelers to the Emirates Lions assistant coach Swys de Bruin, who has been an integral part of the Johannesburg side’s resurrection from Super Rugby outcasts to finishing as the 2nd-best team in the South African franchise this season.
However, De Bruin declined, citing unfinished business with the Lions which left the EP Kings and Southern Kings coaching positions in limbo.
Both the Cell C Sharks and the DHL Stormers are also looking to fill their vacant head coach positions with new Sharks Director of Rugby, Gary Gold, confirming he would not fulfill the coaching role any longer and the Capetonians looking for a replacement for Allister Coetzee, who is Japan-bound.
Stonehouse has a proven track record and was awarded the SA Rugby Union’s Coach of the Year award in 2013 after the Steval Pumas were promoted to the Currie Cup Premier Division, following their unbeaten run in the ABSA Currie Cup First Division competition.
The 51-year-old Stonehouse is believed to be among the favourites to take the reins of the Southern Kings when they make their return to Super Rugby.
The Southern Kings’ coaching stocks have been depleted since Director of Rugby Alan Solomons left to coach Edinburgh in 2013 and head coach Matt Sexton returned to New Zealand at the end of that year.
Sport24
Come to the Bulls, Jimmy… the Sharks culture is not your culture… and neither is the culture of the Southern Kings.
You belong in Pretoria!!
Now I just hope the freegin Bulls are awake enough to jump at the option and to sign Jimmy post haste!!
The Bulls are (were) one of the top teams in world rugby and deserve a heavyweight coach who has proved himself as a head coach at the highest level and knows how to manage top players ( and their ego’s). I am not sure whether Jimmy has that kind of experience. He will certainly be a better bet than Matfield though.
grootblousmile wrote:
The Broederbond/Affies/Tuks Mafia at the Bulls will never give him a chance to coach
Just like they never gave Kitch the opportunity
@ Victoriabok:
Jimmy used to be a waterkloof man, I dont thing he has a healthy relationship with the bulls at present… could probably end up going to the sharks.
Good article by Voldy
Did we really manage to beat the All Blacks only 14 times in the last 51 games?
http://www.sarugbymag.co.za/blog/details/sa-franchises-have-failed
SA franchises have failed
Excellence must be acknowledged and mediocrity deemed unacceptable if South Africa’s Vodacom Super Rugby results are to change, writes MARK KEOHANE in Business Day.
South African rugby, with the necessary honesty, will always be a factor in world rugby, but the illusion of grandeur among so many rugby folk is misplaced and embarrassing.
There’s such a celebrated history with our rugby. You only have to spend a morning watching schools rugby anywhere in the country to know the richness of the game.
My boy’s a SACS lad and the school hosted Paul Roos a fortnight ago. SACS Junior and High fielded 40 teams in the day and a school with 151 years of rugby tradition honoured the visitors, who this year are celebrating their 150th year in rugby.
Paul Roos is more a rugby academy than a schools rugby team these days, but the beauty of the day was the SACS jersey is no different to the one worn 151 years ago. Ditto the Paul Roos colours. Tradition has been respected without compromise but growth has not been stalled.
Our U20s have been the talk of the World Rugby Championship and there’s huge regard for the potential of the Springboks on any given Saturday. South Africa’s best run-on XV stands shoulder to shoulder with any in the world.
But our Vodacom Super Rugby professional franchises have failed. It’s been an abysmal effort across the franchises this season, as it was last season – and the one before that …
We’ve lauded the Lions for not being the whipping boys but the reality is they finished eighth.
New Zealand’s Crusaders don’t qualify for the top six play-offs, despite having the sixth-most points.
If Super Rugby’s league system rewarded the six best teams over 16 matches, there wouldn’t be a South African team in the play-offs. New Zealand’s fourth best team (the Crusaders) earned more points than South Africa’s first.
The structured format that ensures a South African, Australian and New Zealand representative in the play-offs (to ensure interest in all three countries) only adds to the illusion in this country that it ain’t half bad when it’s just so bad.
The Stormers, to win the tournament, will have to travel overseas and win a semi-final and final in successive weekends. It won’t happen.
The Cheetahs were a disgrace. The Bulls were even worse, given the quality of their playing squad, and everything has been said about the embarrassment of the Sharks.
Our supporters, defensive, defiant, deluded and ignorant, boast that the Springboks will win the World Cup. Perhaps they will, but that’s simply an elastoplast when major surgery is required to the fabric of the game.
Four of the five Super Rugby coaches won’t head up the South African challenge next year and three of the four overstayed their welcome by more than 24 months.
The Sharks, in Gary Gold, are the exception. Gold arrived in Durban from Japan a week before this year’s tournament started in the guise of the director of rugby and assumed the head coaching role. Now we have learned the Sharks will appoint a head coach for 2016 and Gold will have no hands-on coaching role but be utilised as a director of rugby that oversees the development of the franchise at all levels.
It’s a role better suited to his skills but it doesn’t excuse the fact that the Sharks, supposedly the brand leaders of regional professionalism, effectively attempted a campaign without a head coach.
What arrogance for a franchise in which the Super Rugby myth differs vastly to the reality which reads: no title in 20 years and on average a sixth-place league placing.
Professional coaches in South Africa, with the exception of Jake White and Nick Mallett (of recent vintage) are a protected breed; rewarded for bowing to elected officials and excused for mediocre results. The winners (like Mallett and White) came with egos and opinions and a disregard for those whose status is the result of politicking and electioneering.
White, in particular, is a dirty word within South African rugby’s presidential corridors. He won the World Cup, but was dismissed by those who felt he failed to honour the president and his men.
White then excelled in Australia with the Brumbies and in one season at the Sharks won the South African conference and guided the team to a semi-final. Yet he wasn’t even a consideration for Coach of the Year. He wasn’t liked so his results didn’t matter.
Naka Drotské, as one example, was a popular guy for nine years, so it never mattered that the Cheetahs propped up the stable. Similarly the Lions, and Frans Ludeke was excused sustained failure at the Bulls over the last three years because he knew his place to be secondary to those who govern from the memory of South Africa’s days of sporting isolation.
Allistair Coetzee, at the Stormers, regressed with each year in charge in terms of the potency of the Stormers. The Stormers imploded, choked and won nothing but he has been lauded as if a five-time champion.
There will always be hope in our game but it’s the honesty that has been missing for the last 20 years. We’ve won the Tri-Nations/Rugby Championship and three Super Rugby titles and at a national level the Boks have beaten the All Blacks 14 times in 51 matches. But the only coaching heads that have rolled without hesitation have been those who have been successful.
There should be no rejoicing that four of the five Super Rugby coaches are gone as of the end of this month. There should be embarrassment that so many of them were allowed to stumble along without accountability to results for so long.
We’re a nation of supporters that passionately defend the mediocre but can’t acknowledge excellence. And until that changes, there will be no change in Super Rugby results.
MacroPolo wrote:
It’s not his fault the incestuous lot at the Bulls have their collective heads up their asses
@ Victoriabok: I am not a MK fan because I dislike arrogance in a person. However, he has a sharp mind and his writing speaks the truth to rugby. He more often that not, strikes the nail smack on the head. This piece was no exception. Alastair has done a pretty reasonable job but not a great one. He’s a real people manager but in all fairness, tactically, I can’t see him standing with the very best. And that’s the point Keohane is trying to make isn’t it?
@ robzim: Agree Rob. Don’t know Stonehouse much but he has done extra-ordinary things in his time around Nelspruit. But the Bulls are a ‘big’ brand and big brands demand the best. Like a recognised internationally successful management team. OR they will simply fail again. We really do have such abysmally poor management in our rugby. Which (surprise surprise) reflects in the results.
Tassies wrote:
I don’t like the poison dwarf either but he knows what he’s talking about
AC’s only mistake was not to bring in experts to strengthen his shortcomings like HM did in 2007, he would have done even better in Super rugby
jimmy sal nie regkom by die tjarks nie…….heeltemal te veel primadonnas daar
@ Victoriabok:
@ Tassies:
There’s a difference between knowing what you are talking about and saying what everyone else is already thinking.
Just saying….
@ Victoriabok:
Excellent post.
@ Victoriabok: Agree. With the greatest respect to Fleckie, he’s not the sharpest tool in the box. A top tactical backline specialist might have done the trick to elevate them to greater heights. We’ll never know.
@ Stormersboy: Yes. Except he’s been harping on about this for some time, while we’ve been living in hope. I include myself in this camp of course.
@ Stormersboy: and we all thought(pre-tournament) the Bulls might have an outside chance of taking the title this year. En kyk hoe lyk hy nou.
The Reason I prefer Jimmy Stonehouse to the other options we face, like Matfield & Fourie du Preez speculation bandied about, is that Jimmy Stonehouse is a bit of a diciplinarian and does not take shit from his players… yet his players at the Pumas were ready to die for him… and out of scraps he built a very deliberate and competent side, who punched way, way above their weight!
The Bulls need a coach with a strong hand, and not a buddy-buddy soft-cock type of coach.
For things to turn around at the Bulls, there needs to be change, radical change. New systems need to be put in place, the current system needs to be demolished and repaired… and a new vision and game plan needs to be developed… and we won’t see it under Matfield & Fourie du Preez.
Other than Jimmy Stonehouse, who else is there?
Maybe Heyneke Meyer… but then he could have his Springbok tenure extended for another 4 years and / or will only be available after 31 October, so that complicates matters somewhat, as the new coach would have to be given the opportunity to help identify possible new signings to play his type of game (otherwise we will just sit with a typical Gary Gold scenario, where he inherited a team and had very little time to mould a side he was satisfied with going to war with).
Let’s be serious, we cannot expect a Nick Mallett or a John Mitchell at the Bulls, nor a John Plumtree… so we would either have to use Nollis Marais (in house at the Bulls and continuing after the Currie Cup) or we would have to be creative and give a man with a plan, like Jimmy Stonehouse a chance.
Whatever the Blue Bulls Company decides, now is the time to make sweeping changes, now is the time for a good overhaul of a depleted squad and for new fresh ideas to take firm hold.
Making easy and predictable changes will result in 1 thing and 1 thing only… continuance of the current state of mediocrity!
Can we go on with the current state of kak afairs, NO!
I am more than ready to take a calculated gamble on someone with potential (with a good coaching pedigree), rather than continue with the same old, same old… in fact I implore the Blue Bulls Company to be brave!
I think Mark is a bit harsh on AC to say he has imploded.
Nobody ( Including Keo) gave the inexperienced Stormers team any chance before this season started and backed the Bulls/Sharks to be the top SA team. AC certainly deserves credit for the work he has done with such an inexperienced team and also for the young players he brought through and also for the fact that the Stormers are the most “transformed” team in SA rugby… ( whether one likes it or not it is a factor one needs to take into consideration).
IMO the main reason that AC could not achieve anything better than to win 3/5 conference titles is the fact that he for one or other reason failed to bring a proper half back pair to CT during his tenure. Peter Grant/ Duvenhage/ Catrakilles/Schreuder/Groome were (are) just not good enough to win superrugby titles ( not even talking about poor Coleman who is not even close to super rugby standard.
AC was a bit unlucky with the Jantjes experiment as the player never settled after his dad died and he had a bad start but he could have done better than to persist with below par players in these vital positions. The purchase of Vermaak was a bit late and AC will also not have the opportunity to work with emerging stars like Brandon Tomson and Jason Phillips who look as if they could be the real deal.
18 @ robzim:
I think I can see it both from your side and Marks, sure the Stormers won the conference cup, albeit in an extremely weak conference, but I think AC has imploded in the sense that the Stommers has regressed. For three years where they ended between 1st and 2nd on the league table, they did very well and since then have been worse… actually much worse, ending 7th, 11th and 7th.
No doubt AC has done very good things though… did much better than Gert Smal did.
I think the Bulls missed the pot by letting Pieter Russouw go, he should also have had his name in the hat to take over as the head coach… I think Rassie could be a dark horse that will come out of nowhere to take over during Super Rugby.
20 @ MacroPolo:
What do you think Slapchips’ special qualities are, which makes him a viable candidate for a Super Rugby head coach position at the Bulls?
1. Has the Bulls backline been playing great attacking rugby?
2. Has the Bulls backline displayed exciting running lines?
3. Has the Bulls backline ball distribution been very good?
4. Has the Bulls backline been able to change tack or switch to a “Plan B”, when “Plan A” has not worked?
5. Does Slapchips have a dominant coaching personality, a great motivating ability and the ability to gel the players… or has he been dominated by the other coaching staff and even by a player-coach like Victor Matfield?
6. Is Slapchips a more viable option than Victor Matfield, again considering qualities?
7. Does Rossouw understand the intricasies of forward play to be able to make good Forwards selections?
My answers and opinion to all the above questions is NO, and a very big No at that!
Let’s be very sensible about this, what do YOU consider the vital check boxes a prospective coach needs to tick to be a serious contender and / or to be appointed as head coach? I’m asking, not saying… I’d really like to hear how you would go about measuring and comparing candidates!
@ grootblousmile:
stel vir naka aan man
22 @ smallies:
Hehehe
Ek dink nie so nie man, Smallies… hahahaha
@ grootblousmile:
ek dink hy tiek al die boksies,soos frans by die leeus het hy die cheetahs mooi op geneuk hy kan niebrerig engels praat nie hy glo ook aan n verbeeldinglose game plan,en hy het die extra boksie getiek…..hybsal die spelers se huweloks lewe mooi op die tone hou
@ grootblousmile:
It is actually immaterial what I believe the right fit would be for the bulls, because it is telling that we all know that it is unlikely that the Bulls management will go outside their inner circles. Pieter joined in in 2008 and for years the bulls were not only the best attacking team in SA, they were one of the best in the tournament, or was this “only on the team that Heyneke built”?
In my opinion seeing the way Russouw was forced out his contract is indicative of how the Bulls are currently running things, so debating on who would be a good coach for the bulls is about similar to debating on how awesome the world would be without war, countries or religion.
And ever since Russouw announced he was leaving the Bulls play took a complete nosedive, the attack and even the defence, scoring 12 (4 in the last game) and conceding 19!
The Bulls biggest problem over the last 2 years has been ball retention rather than distribution, running lines. Even this useless Bulls looked looked different when they could secure quick ball this year, the first thing the next coach has to sort out is to have forwards that can help secure quick ball, the bulls have none, the only bulls player that has shown any abrasiveness at the breakdown in the last few weeks was Grant Hattingh, everyone else is trying to be like Matfield…
So in essence my point is that even Slapchips would give me more confidence than Matfield.
@ grootblousmile:
It is quite ironic that you are trying to have a go at slapchips, the Bulls attack is honestly the least of our problems,
sort out the scrums, the breakdown (select more abrasive forwards to secure quick ball) and the defense (we conceded nearly double the tries that the Brumbies did) and 8 more than the Hurricanes.
I think many of those tries were from turnovers too.
Honestly, if you look at the shambles in our forwards, with ludeke and matfield at the helm, I quite honestly do not think spalchips could do any worse.
slapchips*
Oh yes and Mr Roux,
whoever is coach does not matter, it is POINTLESS if we keep Wessel Roux on board, we deserve to be laughed at, but it is okay because they are all chommies.
MacroPolo wrote:
Agree with you there we have bigger problems than backline play
We played a kick and chase game without chasing every ball
We tried the old 2007-2010 game plan kicking the ball out and then trying to steal the opponents ball without having the locks to do it (except Vic)
Callie practiced lineouts every day but on Saturday he couldn’t throw in to save his life.
That is throwing a ball to Victor, the best lineout lock we have.
Even the most blind TMO could be led to the side of the field, tell his dog to sit, put down his white cane, take the ball and throw and still find Victor
But Callie can’t
We can’t scrum and we kept picking the same useless scrum collapsing props and handed the opposition at least nine to twelve points on a plate with scrums alone
That’s excluding the optional extra’s we gave away with Stegmann and Dean playing the ball on the ground and not rolling away
Until we can’t do the basics right we’ll never be successful
25 – 28 @ MacroPolo:
You’ve cleverly sidestepped my questions, well most of it except maybe that you think Rossouw would be a better option than Matfield.
Take note that I agree with you that Matfield is not a coach’s arse… yet…. and subsequently that I do not want him to take over the vacant coaching job at all!
You say it’s immaterial who you think would suit the Bulls Head Coach position, but yet, this line of questions I have posted to you is EXACTLY because you suggested Pieter Rossouw as coach, so no it’s not immaterial, I would really like to know why you rate him as a coach.
In fact you might be thinking about aspects I have not considered, so make a valid argument for him and I might change my perspective about him, is what I am saying!
So, if you do not mind, I’ll repeat what you have failed to answer…
1. What do you think Slapchips’ special coaching qualities are, which makes him a viable candidate for a Super Rugby head coach position at the Bulls?
2. Has the Bulls backline been playing great attacking rugby (lately)?
3. Has the Bulls backline displayed exciting running lines (in the last 4 years)?
4. Has the Bulls backline ball distribution been very good (in the last 2 seasons)?
5. Has the Bulls backline been able to change tack or switch to a “Plan B”, when “Plan A” has not worked (since Rossow joined the Bulls)?
6. Does Slapchips have a dominant coaching personality, a great motivating ability and the ability to gel the players… or has he been dominated by the other coaching staff and even by a player-coach like Victor Matfield?
7. What do YOU consider the vital check boxes a prospective Bulls coach needs to tick to be a serious contender and / or to be appointed as head coach?
8. I’d really like to hear how you would go about measuring and comparing and then choosing a candidate for the Bulls head coach position?
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