Ex Sport 24
A lot is always made of the conditions ahead of a Springbok tour of the northern hemisphere, but my experience on my last couple of visits to Dublin, the venue for Saturday’s opening test of the current tour, is that you don’t always get what you expect.
On the last trip, in 2012, it rained for much of the week building up to the game and I remember ending up being drenched almost every time I went for a run. But match day turned out to be clear. Two years before that, in 2010, it was clear most of the week, which was reportedly the case when the Boks arrived in Dublin for this latest assignment, but it started raining two hours before kick-off and never let up.
In 2006, when Jake White’s under-strength team started a tour that also included two tests against England, the Boks were quite literally blown away on a bitterly cold and blustery evening. Two years before that, in 2004, White spent the week talking about the conditions, which looked miserable from my hotel window right up until the Saturday, when suddenly it was clear, and it was left to Kiwi referee Paul Honiss, rather than Mother Nature, to spoil the Bok hopes of completing an unbeaten tour.(WHO WILL EVER FORGET THIS BENT KIWI REF. HE TOLD SMIT TO TALK TO HIS MEN AND WHILE THEYWERE TALKING ALLOWED IRELAND TO SCORE A TRY. HE LATTER APOLOGISED FOR THE"MISTAKE" A VERY TYPICAL BENT KIWI REF!!)
There have, of course, also been times when the conditions have been over-prioritised, and there have also been tours to the north where the conditions have been almost South African. One such trip was the 1997 tour to France, Italy and the UK, when Nick Mallett’s team encountered dry conditions in every test match - the midweek team drew the short straw on that trip - and racked up record wins.
An oddity was when Peter de Villiers’ Boks started their 2008 tour in Cardiff. They prepared an ultra-conservative game plan, with Ruan Pienaar playing flyhalf and being told to kick every ball, and it was justified by pointing at the conditions. But were they proper northern hemisphere conditions if you consider that the Millennium Stadium roof was closed for that game?
Edinburgh, a city the Boks don’t visit on this tour, has been the one where the feared northern conditions have tended to have the most say. Mallett's team scored 68 points on a dry day in 1997 but in 2002 Rudolf Straeuli’s team lost to Scotland in conditions that made Murrayfield one of the most miserable places I have ever visited, and it was the same in 2010, when De Villiers’ team was also beaten.
Last year it was wet there too, with light rain coming in not long after I had returned from a run up to Arthur’s Seat and filed a short story saying that for once a Bok/Scotland game would be played in the dry!
But that turned out to be a good thing for the Boks, as Willie le Roux, who did not start at fullback in the first game of the tour against Wales the week before, took the opportunity to prove to coach Heyneke Meyer that he could indeed hack it in northern conditions. In his case that meant that he showed ability in fielding the high ball and also in applying his tactical kicking game.
Regardless though of Le Roux’s success in that match, his tactical kicking is still a work in progress, as would be that of newcomer Handre Pollard at flyhalf, and the memory of Pollard’s one poor performance in the Bok No 10, the match against Argentina in monsoon conditions in Pretoria, is the reason I’m hoping that at least some of the matches on this tour will be played in the wet.
The Boks do need to develop their wet weather game just in case they run into those conditions at the World Cup next year. And even if it is dry, the underfoot conditions will mean that the going ends up being much slower than it is, say, at Ellis Park, where the Boks have played two high tempo games against the All Blacks over the last 13 months.(iN THE WET YOU NEED THE GRUNT OF WILLEMSE BUT COME WHAT MAY WE WILL HAVE THE LEGENDARTY PAP LOCK WEE VICTOR!!)
That is why it would be imprudent of South Africans to start that perennial chant for the Boks to “swing the ball” like they were perceived to have done last time out, and if the Boks play a different game to what we saw from them in the last two matches they have played, it should be entirely expected.
Their handling of the northern hemisphere conditions over the past two tours has given them a better record in that part of the world than the All Blacks over that time period and was the reason some of us started talking of them as World Cup favourites when they returned from Paris last November.
The Boks did show they can play a more possession-orientated game in Cape Town and Johannesburg, but in Dublin and London it might be their ability to bring balance by also accurately executing their kicking game that will be examined most in this dress rehearsal for next year’s World Cup.
WITH WEE VICTOR AND WEE OUPA WE HAVE A PHYSICALLY PAP PACK BY BOK STANDARDS.
OU MAAAIKIE, FOR HOPEFULLY THE LAST TIME, BURGER IS NOT AN IMPACT PLAYER HE IS A STARTER. NOBODY PUTS IN A BETTER 80 MINUTES THAN THE MIGHTY BURGER. HIS LEGENDARY STAMINA IS SECOND TO NONE.
KRIEL IF IT' S DRY COULD BE USED AS AN IMPACT PLAYER MOZ.
