Heyneke Meyer
Springbok coach Heyneke Meyer has admitted that a combination of injuries and the 2 narrow defeats in the opening part of The Rugby Championship have changed his plans slightly, but he is still committed to making conditioning the priority after this week’s clash with Los Pumas at Growthpoint Kings Park.
Meyer said after announcing his team for the match that several 1st choice players will stay behind in Durban when the playing squad travels to Buenos Aires next week for what has the status of a return ‘friendly’ international against the Pumas. However, because he is coaching the South African national team and knows how important winning is to the nation, he’s not going to make changes to quite the extent that he intended to when he did his planning for the Rugby World Cup build-up.
“I’ve always said that I haven’t been happy with the fitness and conditioning and the last 2 matches when we lost in the last few minutes proved that we still have a lot of work to do in that regard,” said Meyer.
“My plan has always been to implement a very intense 3 week conditioning programme after The Rugby Championship is completed and that will mean that some of the top players will be staying behind in Durban next week rather than going to Argentina. If we are going to win the World Cup it is imperative that we get our conditioning right and the players can look forward to a really tough camp.
“The players who do travel to Argentina will slot into that fitness camp after they return. We are going to make an all-out effort to get the conditioning right. It is something that has improved gradually over the past few years, but we need the 3 week conditioning top up that is planned in order to get it totally right.”
The problem for Meyer of course is that the Pumas aren’t regarding next week’s game as a friendly. They’ve made it clear that their intention is to throw everything into the Buenos Aires clash in an attempt to get the win that will see them travel to the Rugby World Cup with the massive boost of having beaten the Springboks for the 1st time.
Meyer knows that and while a successful Rugby Championship campaign might have prompted him to be more risky in his approach to the return game on the other side of the Atlantic, he knows that the 2 narrow defeats to the Wallabies and All Blacks have taken away the space that he might have had to say “So what”.
Judging from the reaction from some sections of the South African rugby supporting public, there has been a widespread bout of amnesia when it comes to how the Springboks have approached Tri-Nations / The Rugby Championships in previous Rugby World Cup years.
Jake White clearly didn’t care much about the competition in the 2007 Rugby World Cup year, for he sent an under strength squad on the away leg of the Tri-Nations that year and they went into the main tournament having lost 3 of their 4 Tri-Nations matches. The plan worked because his team won the Rugby World Cup.
A combination of a few poor selections and the impact of a referee who froze on the big occasion in the match that mattered at the following Rugby World Cup saw to it that the same policy that was adopted by Peter de Villiers didn’t translate into winning the ultimate prize, but the fact remains that he did travel the same route in 2011. The Tri-Nations wasn’t the aim for the season and that reality drove his selection policy, with the 1st choice players staying behind to be coached by Rassie Erasmus when the away leg of the southern hemisphere competition arrived.
It is clear that Meyer sees the staging of The Rugby Championship so close to a World Cup as a bit of a crutch.
“I love The Rugby Championship, make no mistake about that, it is a great competition, but it would suit us better if like the northern nations we were playing friendly internationals now rather than in a major competition. That would make it easier for me to do what I need to do, which is to give players time and to experiment without worrying too much about the result.
“The plan for next week has changed a bit because instead of sending a completely 2nd string team to Buenos Aires, I am going to have to mix and match the selections a bit as the 2 earlier defeats have made it more imperative for us to win these remaining 2 matches so that we can go to the World Cup with confidence.”
Meyer has been helped a bit by the fact that injuries have made it important for some 1st choice players to play in Buenos Aires for the purposes of getting game time. And then there is another factor that shouldn’t be overlooked and which is now starting to weigh on Meyer’s thinking – after Saturday’s clash in Durban there will still be 6 weeks remaining until the Springboks’ opening Rugby World Cup game against Japan in Brighton, on 19 September.
That’s a long time for the players not to be playing matches and there are enough players in the squad who might actually benefit more from getting game time and lessening the chances of becoming match rusty than they would from going straight into a Spartan type conditioning camp.
SuperSport