White warns of Bok time bomb

http://www.sport24.co.za/Rugby/RugbyChampionship/Jake-White-warns-of-Bok-time-bomb-20130821

And now, what do you guys say.  I think the other teams are just bang.  You mean SA is the only country?  Do all the Argentina players play in that country?  Kak man!

Cape Town - Former Springbok coach Jake White has said the Springboks’ policy of picking overseas players is a ticking time bomb.

Speaking to Ballz Radio, White, currently spending time in South Africa with his family on a break from his duties as Brumbies coach, fired a warning to South African rugby.

White cautioned that SA could lose players, sponsors and weaken domestic rugby if they continued to allow overseas players to be selected for the national side and warned that SARU was at risk of “killing the goose that lays the golden egg”, by diluting the domestic game.

“Rugby is now a global game. If (players) are still allowed to play for South Africa while they are earning money overseas, they would be crazy to stay in South Africa and play domestic rugby,” White said.

White said he was alarmed by the large amount of overseas players now playing for the Springboks.

“Last weekend a team with 10 overseas Springboks beat Argentina. When I coached (the Springboks) I wasn’t allowed to pick players earning money overseas. I was only allowed to pick players if they came back to SA and re-committed themselves to South African rugby.”

“They are sending out the wrong message to young players. You can’t have your cake and eat it. They are going to lose a lot of players to foreign clubs.”

White suggested that if the Springboks continue to pick players overseas, SA rugby could risk losing ground on its traditional rivals.

“Australia and New Zealand don’t (pick foreign-based players for the national team), (SA) are the only team in the top-three that does it,” said White.

Thank you Beeno, I found this gem on that other site..

 White is missing the point. Its strange he would. He coaches in oz and earns Oz dollars! At 15.07 rands to the pound. Bothy nz and Oz have much better currencies than ours. We cannot be compared to them.

NOTHING will stop players leaving for these incredibly lucrative contracts. Unless we can find a way to pay our players a competitive amount they will leave for the huge amounts they can earn overseas.

Ou maaikie you must first get the principle right. ie select the best players regardless of location. You just confue the issue with your appraoch. Players you think worthles others think are okay . So argue the principle.

Case closed.

 ou maaaikie please look up the comparative exchange rates. Oz and nz currency is much stronger.

Man when will ou maaaikie get it!!! 

Moz, some more food for thought. More recent salary figures:

Top ten earners in the French Top14 League, and note that those are monthly salaries: 

Jonny Wilkinson (Toulon) - €56,000 (£48,155) per month

Jonathan Sexton (Racing Metro) - €52,000 (£44,711)

Bryan Habana (Toulon) - €50,000 (£42,991)

Morgan Parra (Clermont Auvergne) - €46,000 (£39,555)

Thierry Dusautoir (Toulouse) - €43,000 (£36,975)

Dimitri Szarzewski (Racing Metro) - €41,000 (£35,254)

Carl Hayman (Toulon) - €41,000 (£35,254)

Bakkies Botha (Toulon) - €41,000 (£35,254)

Jamie Roberts (Racing Metro) - €40,000 (£34,394)

Matt Giteau (Toulon) - €40,000 (£34,394)

Exactly. And Jake White conveniently ignore that in his critique.

Yep as you know  I rate Jake as our best hope for another RWC...were  he to get the chance. But this is just gratuitous rubbish.

I have also always rated Jake, but that does not mean that I have to agree with everything that he says and does.

 We are actually in quite serious trouble. Our Super 15 stock of players is severely affected by all this. If it were not for the huge amount of talent we produce we would be finished - toast

IMO white is correct, the Boks should only pick SA based players, but its the state of SA rugby is what is going to get hit the hardest, not so much the Boks.

i think that players who play in the spXV are exposed to more rigouros styles then any other club in the world, from the kiwis expansive game, the saffas forward power and the aussies ability to adapt to the extrems of their SANZAR bros.
spXIV and the bulls golden era was the only noteable success that SA have evr ecperienced, its been a long time between drinks since then (even longer before then), so whats going to happen when players go overseas to ply their trade???

the salaries dont have to be comparable, but they do need to be at a level where the players are more then comfortable to live off within SA.

NZs dollar maybe stronger then the rand, but its still nothing to the sheer volume of cash that the NH and japanese clubs are throwing around, but the diffference is NZ are able to retain the bulk their players cos of the All Black dream.
the most common category of players who leave NZ shores fall under -
injury plagued career - richard kahui, anthony borric
close to retirement - adam thomoson, brad thorn
All Black dream is all but over - rene ranger, brendan leonard, mils muliaina, jason eaton

these reasons plus those not good enough for a level higher like thomas wladrom or mike harris are why we lose players overseas, but the All Black dream is still able to enotce the vast majorit to stay on, just look at all the 30+ year olds still in the All Blacks.

if SARU put their foot down and select SA based players only, it will go a long way to stopping the flow of top level players boosting overseas.
but given the lack of success that the Boks in particular have had, its obvious that SARU feels that the depth in SA alone will not achieve anything excpet the odd win here and there.

also using white coaching the brumbies as a compartive example to the SA players going overseas is just retarded, unlike those SA players leaving, white didnt have a coaching job in SA, thats why his first coaching gig since the 2007 RWC was the brumbies in 2012.

Sasu with all due respest, you are once again demonstrating your lack of understanding the domestic situation in SA and the influence of it upon the decision making by the players. To say that "the salaries dont have to be comparable, but they do need to be at a level where the players are more then comfortable to live off within SA" is daft, especially considering what they can earn. Once again, there is no way that SARU or the Stormers or even the two of them combined can offerd to pay players like Habana, and others like him,  in excess of €40,000 Euro per month. If it was only the money, then one could probably have made a case about this. Yes, the money is and will remain the main issue but the rest of it plays its part to make the money just so much more attractive.

I don't know if you have noticed the "new" quota rules that have just been pushed through. At first glance it would be easy to say that it is only at Vodacom cup level, but if you look at it in a broader sense, you should notice the knock-on effects of it all. The Vodacom cup is the first step into the Currie Cup, which is the first step to SuperRugby and eventually test rugby. This means that promising players are going to get blocked at the Vodacom Cup already. Need I elaborate any further?

Jake White are sitting back comfortably in his protected job at the Brumbies where he almost has carte blanche to make and break. He knows pretty darn well what it is like to be a Springbok Coach, and if he had free reign when he was coach, he would certainly have made a few different selections himself. That I can assure you.

It is not the players moving abroad alone, that is or is going to hurt SA rugby. It is all the other shenanigans that goes with it.

But hey. Back in the day when idiots held demonstrations in NZ and dropped flour bombs on rugby players and spectators, they did not consider that things might eventually have turned out the way they did, did they. No wonder one of the guys involved in that campaign declined the offer to receive an SA decoration saying that it was because what has eventually happened was not what he "fought" for.

Well what do you know? What exactly has our friend just say?

"They normally would earn in the vicinity of between Euro 20 000 and 30 000 per month. That is probably somewhere like Euro 5 000 more than what top players in SA earns"  Two things to take into account. The first one is the term "probably", which equates to "I think but I am really not too sure at all". The second one is that €5,000 is more than R 68,000 and that is per month, my friend. I think a lot of people in SA would give a lot to earn "just" €5,000 per month.

"The more pedestrian nonsensical members of this site like Mozart and Ceradyne will keep on argueing on the money angle and that is just pure and simple rubbish - to be quite frank." You mean those members who don't post pages and pages of nonsensical bullshit, repeating the same crap over and over and over. But in any case, you have probaly not read my reply to Sauke where I cklearly said that the money issue is not the only problem. In fact, I have mentioned on numerous ocasions that the money is not the only issue. The issue about the money combined with all the other factors obviously went right over your head.

"That is why SARU should get their act together and make sure the really valuable players are contracted locally....." The really valuable players are actually the ones who are lured away and SARU does not have the means to compete financially with the overseas clubs.

"What is impotant - and has been identified by White 100% correctly - is that the real issue here is team selection - and that Meyer is a dunce in selecting a team with 7 foreign-based ex-Bulls players - none of them really irreplaceable - and two other foreign-based players." Who would have been the first to start bitching if Meyer did ignore those players, and I mean every one of them, and we lost? You cannot say that you only select only two overseas players and ignore the rest. You either select all the overseas players that are better than the local ones, or you select none, not even Bryan Habana and Francois Louw. That is how you impliment a "no overseas players" policy. In any case, the fact that only two deserved their spot is your own opinion.

Oh and then the ever favourite declaration of your own opinion as fact, in the last sentence of your post.

first white is just saying that i have been posting about for many a time. picking overseas based players has and will be the slow poisen that will destroy sa rugby strength in the long run. HM obsession with winning will cast a far bigger shadow over our future stars looking to jump onto money boat that overseas based players are getting and i am not saying there are in the wrong at the end of the day they are making money just like anyone else. but saru is showing its hands by picking overseas based and there will be a even bigger exodus of players mark my word. so much so that SA rugby will be nothing more than the milking cow of world rugby. much like in the vain of the south sea islands that seem to produce players only for the AB's wales and england to use.

the only way to stop this cancer is to be strong and firm and in the long run SA rugby will be far better off. this is very much a meyer mind set it seems as under no other coach in our history have we ever lost so much players to overseas clubs.

interm of beeno rubbish comment yes the NZ dollar and aussie dollar is stronger but do you see them chasing there overseas based players ??????? no and why because they know if will open up huge can of worms if they do follow that path.

interms of moz's idea of a player fund i agree but we will always be fighting against the weak rand the other option which i think we ill be the best option is to align overselves with our europe partners and ditch the sanzar alliance. the net result will be much higher funds our local clubs will be far better off in terms of the euro rand exchange rate. bigger paychecks=better payed players and we can keep the players that we have.

there is other commercial options that clubs can use to expand the coffers but at the end of the day economics will always win but SARU's only saving crace is that amazing allure of the bok jumper and that allone has kept our players in our shores for quite a while (beeno seems to forget this as massive exodus has only happend in the meyer era)

good formulated strong selections policys will keep our game strong for a long time but bending to everyones wim will turn our airports into rugby players turnstiles.

Play for your country, or go overseas and set you, and your family up for the rest of your life with the money you will make...

If you're a borderline test player then there's not even a hesitation to the answer.

If you are a guy like Bekker, or Etzebeth, then you will probably just play in SA until you're 30ish, and then leave for the money. Either way, guys are going to go because of the weak rand. It's not about playing for the Boks. It's about the money.

i agree 100% if a player wants to leave then let him leave but then he needs to understand his bok career is over.........the way things are now spongers like louw and co can play overseas and milk saru for there bok contracts so its clearly sending the signal that its normal for players to go overseas at the start of there career rather than later.

i am sure many sport agents are rubbing there hands for the chance to market there players to overseas based clubs now.

Why should the players bok Career be over? The South Africans leave because of the money. With the way the sport is going If you stop picking overseas players in your Bok squad then the Boks are going to be no good within a decade. The majority of the players will always go for the money. Especially when they hit the ages of Habana and Bekker. Money is what will get them through their very long retirement. They have to think about themselves, and their families first.

Why not pay some players in a different currency? In Ice Hockey(the NHL) players that play in Canada on Canadian teams get payed in American money.