Bittersweet blow for Boks
8 Nov 2009
Chiliboy Ralepelle and Gurthro Steenkamp have been ruled out for the rest of the European tour due to injury.
Ralepelle, the South Africans’ midweek captain, left the field in the 20th minute of Friday’s game against Leicester. It’s yet to be confirmed whether the foot injury is the same that sidelined him for the back end of the Currie Cup, and he will see a specialist on his return to South Africa.
On the back of a poor performance against the Tigers at scrum time, Steenkamp also returns from England having suffered a knee injury. Jannie du Plessis is also reported to have a hand injury, but at this stage will remain with the touring party.
Cheetahs duo Wian du Preez and Adriaan Strauss, who should have been included on this tour ahead of Steenkamp and Ralepelle by weight of performance in the Currie Cup, will now join the Boks.
The addition of Du Preez and Strauss should bolster the South Africa XV scrum significantly, but it will be interesting to see whether the coaching staff persists with the Heinke van der Merwe tighthead move if Du Plessis’ injury is serious.
The call up should also see the Free State pair warm the bench in the upcoming Test against France. Strauss played for the Boks last season while Du Preez has trained with them before. They’d be the natural selections given their experience, but it will be interesting to see whether Peter de Villiers picks them ahead of Bandise Maku and Van der Merwe.
Maku has battled for game time at the Bulls in 2009 while Van der Merwe is coming off a serious injury and did not play for the Lions in the Currie Cup.
It makes sense to pick Strauss and Du Preez, but it also raises the question of why they weren’t selected in the first place.
213 Comments
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8 Nov 2009, 15:46 pm
Puma,
As jy nog in die omgewing is wil ek net cheers se.
Lekker dag.
8 Nov 2009, 15:59 pm
Os is to all accounts a good sound student and advocater of forward ability and would be a good acquisition as front row mentor and doctor in the Bok setup, as would Cobus Visagie or M. Proudfoot. However he would still need to see eye to eye with the current bok management setup, and if such consensus is unreachable then whatever his strengths of reasoning or man management abilities might be, his input would to all intents and purposes be more counter productive than productive under the circumstances.
Rugby philosophy differs between individual to individual so for a particular combination to work it would need complete buy in from all involved and not one opinion contradicting the next. This is why it possibly would not work for Os to be aligned with bok’s under Pdv unless they can both read from the same hymn sheet.
8 Nov 2009, 16:07 pm
#194 Langenhoven: Since Walyon kept Adi out of the 13 berth while Muir was in charge, and won his test caps while White was with the boks, hardly makes your statement credible.
I don’t support the Lions at all but I’m glad that Maku and Murray will go to a team where they have a good chance of starting, and subsequently excelling.
Maku has loads of potential and Murray was before his injury one of the few physically imposing centres in this country who actually went for the gap. His partnership with La Grange should be interesting.
Agree that Lions tend to buy all their POC players, but not sure if you can call them a graveyard just yet. Although Rose’s fall from consistent WP grace did start at the Lions…
8 Nov 2009, 16:14 pm
#201,
I totally agree. I think the problem Os has is that he’s a realist and speaks his mind when necessary. A vice in our beloved country.
8 Nov 2009, 16:28 pm
if ludick doesnt move to the tank then i think muir will start rose at 10 consistently under instruction from pdivy
8 Nov 2009, 16:34 pm
No since when is being honest about anything a vice. Most people that find things untenable in a particular setup or surrounding usually pack up and make like Donald and duck for greener pastures or new less demanding circumstances.
Perhaps both Os du Randt and Pdv have headstrong ideas about what they think to be valuable in the country’s rugby ambition. If those ideas are not aligned in a similar direction then it could not work. On the other hand if ideological differences can be set aside for the sake of a win win result. Then the sky is the limit and we could all prosper. It depends largely on individuals understanding the overall big picture view and not their own petty introspect ideas or ambitions.
Anyone seeing an individual as being inferior to himself purely as a result of some underlying preconceived ethnically inspired prejudice is not seeing the true picture in true perspective but through the shady spectacles of color coded prejudice.
Pdv may have his flaws of that I have no doubt, but most rugby ideologists in this country don’t see his flaws for what they are, they see his personality and his background first and judge him with the eyes and ears of judgmental delinquents. Unfortunately the rugby going public in this country are not free of preconception or prejudice, it is so inherently ingrained it is practically enshrined in rugby’s religious thinking before any rational thought takes place at all.
8 Nov 2009, 17:24 pm
#192 grant10: A lot has been said, mainly I believe, due to each blogger’s sincere disappointment at Friday night’s loss, and with each blogger having their favourites they punt, things have sometimes gotten totally out of hand here on this site. This morning I sat down and watched the game for I think the fourth time. This time I tried to remain objective and look past the individuals to look for where things went wrong. These are my honest feelings about it all.
1. Yes, there were some dodgy selections which were shown up. These were not necessarily youngsters(in fact mostly the contrary), quota-related, or even really bad selections, and the coaching staff have obviously had some specific questions about individuals that they needed to have, and I believe have been, answered. In their quest I suspect they always knew they might be exposed in the process, but the answers they needed lie at the heart of their way forward in developing this team personnel and playing style wise, and had to be answered.
2. Not enough credit is being given to the wiley Leicester coaching staff. They picked two monster props who are veterans and ‘hardebaarde/ou manne’ and two hookers of the same calibre. Losing Ben Kay just before the match, they pulled Ayerza the prop and replaced him with Stankovitz, an even better scrummager, because they were then forced to pick two smaller inexperienced locks. Cudos to them. I don’t believe the Bok test pack would have done any better.
3. Everybody is blaming our loosies for not providing us with an 8 man scrum, but the truth is Leicesters’ loosies didn’t scrum either. Go and look at the match again. Their loosies’ body position looked good and low while ours look high and bad, because we were going backward at a rate of knots. It was a question of their tight five monstering ours. And our props opted for illegal tactics to bail out of the scrums by collapsing, so no amount of further pressure from behind by the loosies would have made a difference. in fact during one scrum that split, Danie Rossouw went hurtling out of the scrum past Gurthro, and could have been injured. Truth being, in the Southern hemisphere 8man scrums are a luxury due the speed of the game, and you need especially your fetcher to hang loose to buy that extra split second. Hence the term loose forwards. So if 8man scrums were required, it should have been identified by the coaches and practiced in properly, as it is a departure from our style of play. Enough said.
4. One problem though, mentioning the scrum splitting, it showed one of the unsung values/ assets of Pierre Spies’ upper body power to keep the locks together behind the scrum when the frontrow struggles. This is one area where we missed him, and our no 8 defended on an ad hoc basis out wide and on the chase, but he was conspicuously abscent at the breakdown and tightloose in a team being severely stretched in those areas. But with ball in hand, to his credit, he was great, although it would have been nice if he could have made the cover tackle on Amorosino. At this level it is not good enough just to get there- you have to nail the tackle as well. And in the final moments, it would also have been nice if he had stuck to the structure instead of hurling the ball out wide in a high risk move, wheras the plan was clearly to slow it down until the defence was sucked in. But he was brilliant with ball in hand.
5. The Tigers’ style of play at the breakdown is a coached set style of play ensuring numbers and going forward over the ball to counter any possibility of fetching at the tackleball. Often, in the Southern hemisphere, they do not support their own weight in the rucks, and don’t even try. Instead, they go to seal off the ball. So, in my view, not even Heinrich Brussow would have been able to make a single steal on Friday.
6. As regards the captaincy, we should have started the game with the captain we ended it with. The moment he took over, the guys came together and he was clearly the glue that made them stick together in the last 10 minutes. Again I believe the coaches should have been on top of that one as well. Clearly, and hindsight is an exact science, the guys rallied behind him and for the first time played as a team. I predict a huge step up against Saracens.
7. I also got the feeling that the more experienced guys (the ussual test reserves), to a man, did not show any leadership in the team to help to pull the youngsters together and settle in.
8. Finally, they had an on-form 10 while ours made too many basic errors and kicked badly tactically. If I were the coach, given Earl’s game, I would have switched 10 and 15 early on. On that point, I believe Earl put one over on all his detractors in this game. Now I’m waiting for the consistency.
8 Nov 2009, 18:00 pm
#206 catleya:
I agree with most of what you said and pointed out, on Saturday, that PdeV was probably giving some of the senior players a make or break opportunity before he builds his WC squad next year. It was the senior players who performed badly, in the main, as you state.
Regarding body position, this has always been an area where we fall short, due I believe to the harder grounds where players tend to be more upright and use size and momentum to break tackles, whereas in the NH, they tend to go to ground more often because of the playing conditions and use the low body drive to go forward rather than relying on momentum.
8 Nov 2009, 18:14 pm
Nh rugby is a go to ground, seal off and recycle kind of strategy and dominate front foot set phase possession. We been sucker’d into the idea that mobility in the tight 5 is more important than power, hence our reliance on mobile less dominating forwards.
The old set of standards where props were the cornerstone of the vanguard has been supplanted by the idea that props must be ball carrying specialists who drive and fetch in the loose. The pace of the game is far slower in the Nh but structure is far more dominant. And this up n under kick n chase game won’t work up there either. We will have to learn to carry and off load the ball into space and create opportunity if we want to be successful rather than rely purely on individual brawn to bust through defences.
9 Nov 2009, 04:21 am
Chiliboy and Gurthro? Both are only “quotas”, aren’t they?
9 Nov 2009, 10:17 am
Some of the bloggers, especially on keo and rugby365.com, have been all to quick to blame the “quotas”
Personally I think the following did really well – Rose, Johnson, Olivier,
The following didn’t do enough to put their hands up – De Jongh, Bekker, Nokwe, Potgieter, Ndungane, Maku,Adams
AND the following were extremely disappointing, out of their depth or should just be @ home getting rest – Pienaar, Guthro, Chilli, Russouw, Raubenheimer, Janni,
9 Nov 2009, 17:44 pm
Thank the lord for small miracles. P Div either saw this coming and played the politicians, or he is the luckiest SOB in SA.
9 Nov 2009, 17:47 pm
#210 Papoose: agree, it’s not quota players, it’s just mad, bad selections.
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