Outspoken coach De Villiers has polarised public opinion but South Africa just let controversy wash over them
ONLY IN South Africa could there be this amount of intrigue and poison and tragedy. A month ago a rumour circulated that the Springbok coach, Peter de Villiers, was about to be embarrassed by the release of a sex tape, a rumour that spread like wild
fire from Pretoria to Port Elizabeth, from Cape Town to Johannesburg. De Villiers was about to be outed, his family life and his job as Jake White's successor seemingly now in danger.
Chris Hewitt was the communications manager for South African rugby at the time. Hewitt heard the gossip and alerted his employers – and they didn't like it. Didn't like that he brought this to them (no sex tape ever surfaced), didn't like that he gave the rumour credence. De Villiers, a black man, called it a "racist plot" dreamed up by people who wanted rid of him. Venting his anger, De Villiers said he would "give the coaching job back to the whites".
Hewitt was suspended pending a misconduct hearing but resigned soon after. A few weeks later the light aircraft Hewitt was piloting crashed and Hewitt was killed. There was nothing sinister in it, just a terrible accident. Just another in a long line of bewildering incidents in the recent story of the world champions.
They come here on Saturday, for instance, without Luke Watson, the gobby back-row forward from Western Province who spends half his spare time fighting the battles of his father, Cheeky, an anti-apartheid activist from way back, and the other half alienating himself from his Stormers teammates in Cape Town and the Springbok squad as a whole. Luke is a 25-year-old white yet he sounds sometimes like he's a veteran of Robben Island, that he was shoulder-to-shoulder with Nelson Mandela in the really bad old days.
Cheeky was one of the first white South Africans to play in a mixed race rugby match. The Watson family were threatened, shot at and, eventually, burned out of their family home in 1986 as a result. Luke, not surprisingly, grew up an angry young man but the feeling of the overwhelming majority in South Africa is that he's gone too far with his pronouncements of corruption and endemic racism in the South African game. It's been said that Luke's big gripe is not so much the state of rugby in his country but the fact that De Villiers and Jake White before him have ignored his claims on a Test place (he's stuck on nine caps), which are now slim to non-existent. Luke slags off his teammates and calls them nothing short of bigots and then protests that he is not being given a fair shake at Test level. Only in South Africa.
Last month he spoke of his revulsion for the Springbok shirt. "South African rugby is rotten to the core," he said. "The men who sit on the left and right of me in the change room despise me for who I am." He said he has to stop himself "from vomiting" on the national team jersey. The moniker, Puke Watson, was born there and then and is used widely by the group we will see at Murrayfield on Saturday. It is understood that there would have been an uprising in the ranks had De Villiers picked Watson for the tour, such is his vast unpopularity among the Boks.
So, no Luke, and a happy travelling party from South Africa. Well, happy-ish. There is the not insignificant and apparently never-ending debate about the springbok emblem on the jersey, a drama that is on-going despite Mandela saying he didn't find the springbok offensive or a symbol of apartheid, as some key movers at government level do, and despite a South African newspaper, with a largely black readership, showing the results of a poll that had support for the springbok crest running at 70% amongst its readers. The ANC have also advised the government to have a right good think about things before calling for the final removal of the springbok.
That saga rumbles on but it's not likely to deter the Boks. They have had to put up with so much for so long that controversies, no matter how divisive, just tend to wash over these players.
You just cannot second-guess these boys, on or off the park. Just look at their form at the Tri-Nations championship just gone. Their second game brought a win in New Zealand, a thriller and the first time the All Blacks had been beaten on home soil in 30 Tests. They followed that seismic event with three defeats in a row, a run of failure that brought opprobrium on an unbelievable scale down on top of De Villiers' head. It was said that another loss in their final game of the Tri-Nations, at home to Australia, and the coach was toast. The Springboks utterly annihilated the Wallabies by eight tries to one and by 53 points to 8. De Villiers lived on.
But there is something going on there, too. De Villiers made his reputation as a coach on the back of achievements with South Africa's U-19 and U-21 sides but his appointment in the wake of White's departure after the World Cup was a shock one. Now, as much as then, it confuses and divides people.
He's a strange man, the coach. When he arrived first he set out his vision for the future. South Africa, he said, had become too structured. Never mind that all his key men love structure, that his senior players credit much of their World Cup success to pragmatism. De Villiers wanted to take risks. "But Rome wasn't built in a day," he said. What is he talking about, wondered Bok watchers. "We are world champions! Rome has already been built!"
De Villiers keeps bamboozling people. Somebody asked before the Test in Wellington what he was going to say to his team before they ran out. "I'll tell them talk is cheap and money buys whisky," he replied, to a bemused audience.
"We never said it was going to be a perfect world," he said after a Tri-Nations setback. "If you look at the Bible, Joseph started out in the pit and ended up in the palace. There was a moerse lot of kak (lot of shit) in between." This piece of analysis was part of a stream of consciousness that included a line he will not easily shake off: "There's little difference between winning and losing, you just feel better after winning."
He has drawn analogies between himself and all sorts of things. "I was made in a concrete mixer with water, stones and cement. I'm tough." But didn't stop there. After the spectacular destruction of the Wallabies he had a word for his critics and conjured another image that will return to haunt him should things go awry again. "The same people who threw their robes on the ground when Jesus rode on a donkey were the same people who crowned him and hit him with sticks and stuff like that, and were the same people who said afterwards how we shouldn't have done that, he's the son of God. But I'm not saying I'm God."
Of course not. If God was coaching the Springboks he wouldn't have asked his captain, John Smit, a very fine hooker all his days, to suddenly switch to tighthead prop, but that is what De Villiers has done. He could have picked any one of three Europe-based tightheads – Leinster's CJ van der Linde, Ulster's BJ Botha or even the Saracen Cobus Visagie – but he decided to ignore three outstanding options and go all weird. Equally, he has decided to tour with one recognised fly-half, Ruan Pienaar. He's a real talent, Pienaar, a superstar in the making, but there is no back-up should he get injured, apart from Frans Steyn, who is superb at inside centre, excellent at full-back, impressive on the wing but who is wholly unproven at 10. De Villiers said he likes a game of poker from time to time. Well, he's gambling here.
The word is that his senior players go with him because they have no stomach for mutiny. They adopt his free-running game but only to a point. A source close to the squad says that the brains trust on the pitch, Smit and Victor Matfield, are not slow to abandon the De Villiers gameplan if they think they're in a hole. They've done it already in Tests. Ditched it and gone back to the percentage rugby that made them world champions. It is said that the hooker (sorry, the tighthead) and the lock don't just play the game, they coach, too.
How Scotland hope that at some point on Saturday Smit and Matfield have cause to convene a crisis meeting. If they do, it means they know they're in trouble and must change course. If they don't, well, pity the home team.
