The Lions success has contributed to Bok failure

I say contributed because we were bound to decline this year with the effective departure of JP, Jean, F du Preez, Jannie, Bismarck, Victor, Schalk and Vermeulen. Almost every one of these players is a Bok great and the inventory of players challenging them is so thin. In fact not one of these players has a clear cut international potential player replacement.
Closest is probably du Preez with Faf who is being blamed unfairly I think for our poor showing down under. But the rest of the potential subs are a weak bunch. Nor are there any obvious players who will change the picture, despite all the howls that we have great talent. At test level it was always thin....as is the case for most countries. Lose a group like the above and you are in trouble.

This phenomenon has been only one part of the story though, the other is the confusion caused by the Lions success. We now have players in the national team that are comfortable with two different playing styles and we really have to pick one ...albeit with a few twists. We can:
1 Play Lions rugby and try to beef up the physicality. Difficult to do without losing mobility.
2 Play more traditional Bok rugby and improve the handling/finishing skills of the players.
It's clear we have been trying approach 1 with very little success. Many of the Lions players who made the strategy work are simply not able to impose themselves at test level.....and the rest of the Springboks don't have a clue. That's why we have been losing and will continue to lose against the top teams.

But going back to strategy 2 with our current personnel like Jantjies, Whiteley, Kriel and Mostert is not going to work either. And I doubt we will be very succesful for the moment, even with player changes. We have lost too much talent.
Strategy 1 may never produce results and will require years of development. Strategy 2 will probably show modest immediate success, but like England we need a few key players to pull off the power game. Marx who has just been discarded and Willemse strike me as two players who could make it work. But even this strategy requires rebuilding from here.

Either way the happy sunlit fields of post HM rugby don't seem so sunlit anymore. The naive view throwing out our veterans was the obvious key to success has been fully exposed. 

For the record I think approach 2. is the only way to go with our players .....Oz and NZ  have more dangerous backs with their Polynesian pool. We can and should, however, build in some of the handling skills the Lions and even the Bargies are displaying these days. There is no more excuse for forwards who can't catch and pass a ball, and break a tackle if they have the chance. There is also no more excuse for centres who can't offload.
No doubt the Lions admirable success has confused our rugby this year and will till it inevitably recedes, next year is my guess. But they have underlined opportunities we should exploit.

 The departure of JP, Jean, F du Preez, Jannie, Bismarck, Victor, Schalk and Vermeulen took place when the Springboks was sub-standard already and the above all under-performed in the latter part of 2014 and in 2015.   So the rest of your argument falls flat on its face for standard Mozart BS.   Remember JAPAN.      

I think not. Every rugby commentator and writer seems to believe we have gone backwards even since last year. Although the truth is we started going backwards on the YE tour in 2014, when we attributed some good home TN success to Lambie, Hougaard and Reinach. 
And in 2015 the losses were already directly attributable to school boy mistakes by new players at the end of tests.....this year that trend has simply accelerated, because the cause continues to remain untreated.

 The losses in 2015 was entirely due to the poor performances of the over-the-hill players Meyer kept in the squad- to argue otherwise is stupid.   Remember Japan - the lowest point in Springbok history.   Remember also that Meyer was bad - Coetzee is worse.   

But we recovered from Japan, a match we dominated statistically....beat Fiji, Scotland and Wales and ran NZ close making Japan an irrelevant aberration. Where is the recovery for the newbies?

 So we beat some teams subsequently - but that is when some of the tired old useless players were replaced.   And the teams did relatively well against New Zealand last year.   It is a fact that the AB's this year performed better against teams than they did last year - proving that the present players are in fact better than there own retirees.  
How do you manage to come up with the same unsubstantiated BS in thread after thread?   

So 2 newbies supposedly lifted us from losing to Japan to winning the WC Bronze....how come the  8 newbies playing against NZ couldn't lift our performance in that test?
Nonsense Tokkie you tell so many lies you trip over yourself all the time....enjoy your crow.

 Listen - when you started with this story - it was clear you had nothing else to contribute.   You start thread after thread on the same topic.   Nothing new ever forthcoming you have rants about -
*   How badly the absence of Meyer's elderly is affecting our rugby;*   How badly the present team norms compare to the team of last year;*   How poorly the Lions players perform
We all know the Springboks under-perform - nobody needs constant laments on the issue.   What has been proven categorically is that they are o t worse than the team was last year - so that is not the core of the issue.   The team last year was poor - the team this year is poor.
The constant waffling about the Lions players is another joke.  There are no doubt some players who fouled up and did not perform on the basis they did in Super 15.   They have been tried out and failed - but none of them was as bad as for instance Alberts were in the test against the AB's.
Find something new to moan about - not the same topic over and over again.       

 Unfortunately things come to an end ... like life ... our careers ... our health. That is how it's been designed and we have no power over it. Time dictates to us all and rot is the order of the day. Only God is not subject to it.
For how many more years should we have kept the Victors and the Habanas in the mix? 
For how many more years should we have followed HM's ignorant methods of putting our trust into the heroes of 7 years back ... all the while hoping for the best?
At what stage in their careers should we draw the line? When should we replace them with new blood? When they're 50?

HM did us no favours. He went and fetched a lot of players back from retirement and ignored the young. The players he did blood were useless entities like Greyling, Kruger, JJ, Coenie and Taute ... the list goes on and on.
We do not have experienced replacements because of him and so have no choice but to start from scratch. 
In the end it's not about winning today but rather about building for tomorrow and fielding the elderly just delays everything for another year. 

 Greyling and Kruger were "blooded" by PDV. 
Coenie was the "talk of the town" and everybody and his ouma wanted him in the team.

When JJ was first used, he was a "revelation", according to many, and everybody ranted and raved about him after his debut and the next few games when he scored a few great tries. Much like Jesse Kriel. When he, JJ, did not make it, he dropped him.
When Taute was first used, everybody was ranting and raving about him as well, on the back of his "sterling" performances with the Lions. He eventually only had four tests to his credit.
HM also blooded Lood, Eben, PSDT, Goosen, Willie, De Allende, Duane Vermeulen, Handre Pollard, 

 And of the countless he blooded only Eben, Vermeulen, and PSDT who he never liked and hardly used because of Matfield, were stand outs.
They were always going to force their way into the side ... eventually ... with or without HM approval. 
As I'm sure you are aware he tried to bring back guys like Gurthro, Bakkies, Victor, Juan Smith, Fourie Du Preez and Jaque Fourie ... all beyond their best by a few years. 
He persisted with guys like Kirschner, Morne, JJ, Coenie, Lood, HouGat and Taute till his injury. 
He brought in Louw and played him out of position ... and did the same to Jesse Kriel who he insisted was a rugby genius. 
Willie got his chance when Meyer had no other options due to injuries. From wing to full back.
Also remember the guys that left our shores because of him. Kockett, Willemse and Stander but to mention a few. 
I know you rate Meyer as a top line coach. He's a bull and anything bull is tops in your view. You and I have been round and round over this idiot. 

He did nothing for SA rugby other than put us where we are today. 

Now we've entrusted his mess to a bigger mor0n to fix. 
Meyer will forever be remembered as the coach who had vast supplies of talent available to him but chose the old and tired instead. That and the loss to Japan. 

 @CC, I am not going to go into the nitty gritty of who was how old and how experienced and who was selected when and why, because it is water under the brideg and it will be nothing but flogging a dead horse and, TBH, I am a bit tired of revisiting the same old arguments, over and over. I suppose that we have to agree to disagree on a few things. I am sure that we can do that, since I cannot remember the two of us having had much need to get personal, or have done so over time.
I do not fully agree that HM did not like PSDT. He clearly said, right at the beginning that PSDT was one of his "players for the future" and he was seriously p!ssed off when PSDT was injured at the start of his (HM's) tenure. Right at the start his locks were going to be Bekker and Eben, with PSDT as backup. Then PSDT got injured and Bekker got injured and eventually pissed off and Lood came along and also got injured, etc, etc. The hole saga is well recorded. Fact is that PSDT was always in the picture whenever he was available. The problem was that neither he nor Lood were constantly available, due to injuries. 
The same happened with Goosen. HM made no secret that Goosen was his longterm prospect, at the time. He even brought him into the Bok squad prematurely, despite Naka Drotske virtually begging HM to give Goosen a few CC games just to settle back in but HM hurried him in, IMO, mainly because the public were crying for MS' head. 
Many people would like to "credit" HM with the demise of Bok rugby, but I think that it is very unfair. In 2007, when we won the RWC our rugby was strong and fairly sound. We had two SA teams fighting for the Super 14 title and we had players who were automatic choices, not by default but because they were the best, and more importantly, could walk into any other national side, including the ABs. We had pretty much the same in 2011. The fact that we made it to the QF and almost made it into the semis was not down to the coach at all. It was down to the quality of the players. The fact is that PDV left almost nothing  to work with. Less than what HM left behind. You can go check. I have done it before and I still have the players and the numbers on a spreadsheet somewhere.
Now, if you compare that to SA rugby in HM's time. We were crap. We were no factor in Super Rugby. Our best teams got hammered. We had the Lions/Kings fiasco in his time. Fact is that both Jake White and PDV had the luxury of selecting from players from teams that were really good and have either won the Super Rugby or was not too far of the teams in the finals. 
The sad thing is that the slide has not stopped, it has become even worse and the Lions, this year looked better than they are because the other SA teams were k@kker than they were in ages. Remember that  the Lions picked up log points by playing the other (crap) SA sides twice. Yes, they did beat the NZ sides in the first part and they did win the semi-final against a NZ side but that was at home and they were ready  for that game. Jantjies played one of his few great games but when it came to the crunch, they fell apart in the final. I do not have an issue with the fact that they lost against the top NZ side away from home. I have an issue with the way that they buckled under the pressure of a final. 
Also, still on the Lions, we have to remember that they were a side who were really a cohesion because they, not only played together in the Super Rugby competition, but the same side also played together as a unit in the CC. They did not have the disruption of having a new CC team. Also bear in mind that nothing creates cohesion like playing together, as a unit, game after game after game. Look where they are in the current CC competition. Now, very imortant........... I am not at all trying to rubbish the Lions or their coach. Those are only the cold clinical facts.
Despite the above, or maybe because of it, a lot  of people believed that Jantjies had what it takes and that the magical Jantjies/Faf combination was almost all we needed. Sadly Super Rugby is not test rugby and it shows.
I also do not believe the story about players leaving SA because of HM. The day that a player leaves solely because he does not get selected for the Bok side, is the day that I start questioning his ethics and maybe loyalty. That is running away. Those players did not leave because of HM, they made career decisions and left for a better career and life. If playing for the Boks was really that important that they would have stayed just to play Bok rugby, that would have stayed and fight for their chance to convince HM. Playing for the Boks should never be a right and always a privilege. That is why I am dead against central contracts and huge salaries for the national players. Rugby is probably the only sport where this happens.
The only reason why national coaches, and SA national coaches in particular, are always p!ssing about national contracts is because none of them, HM included, have ever really managed to get all the SA coaches to sing from the same hymn book, and I do not mean playing the same game plan . They all claim to be working towards the goal of having a strong Bok side but, back at the ranch, they only have their own interest at heart. I am sure that if the NZRU stop their national contracts today and give all that money to the various sides to pay the players, they would still be world beaters, purely because they have a different rugby culture to us. They, the franchises, etc, all know that if they are the best and follow the same goals, while still keeping the needs of the national side in mind, the national side will be on top. 

 There were guys HM brought back like Kirchner that shouldn't have come back. There were also youngsters like Coenie and JJ that should never have been selected in the first place. Youngsters got plenty of chances in 2013 and 2014, notably on the YE tour with Reinach, Coetzee, Pollard, Stepfontein and Goosen all part of the mix........they never made their claim.
So at the WC HM included the few young players who staked a claim.....Etzebeth and  Pollard. And a few he hoped would come through Lomp, Kriel, Allende, Coenie......the foursome  who made the crucial mistakes that lost the WC. And he was supposed to select more of these youngsters?
Get real.

 Dimwit - Can you not accept that there were more bugger-ups made by the over-the-hill players Meyer favoured than the four you routinely blamed.  H ell but you are an impossible idiot. 

 Dimwit - Can you not accept that there were more bugger-ups made by the over-the-hill players Meyer favoured than the four you routinely blamed.  H ell but you are an impossible idiot. 

 'Impossible'....translation....'too much for me the handle'. 

". . . too much for me the handle."
What?
Sounds like something fro m the Donald Tr(*)mp school of sentence construction.

 Uh-oh Grammar lessons again on a rugby forum...wehe!

It's his best role....let's give him that, he does a great job pointing out careless errors. It's a fine role and it gives him the sense of achievement so lacking in his own crumbling existence.