Jake White: Test rugby has changed a lot since I was Bok coach

I’ve been on a hunting trip into the bush this week. It’s given me plenty of pause for thought about rugby’s direction of travel in recent weeks and where it’s heading…

Making wholesale changes was once derided, now it’s being labelled visionary

When I was coaching internationally, and even before my time, the Tri-Nations teams used to have end of season tours to the Northern Hemisphere and correspondingly we’d return the favour by hosting the Northern Hemisphere sides in their summer.

What would often happen is that when we’d play England and Twickenham, or France at the Parc des Princes and latterly Stade de France, we’d get drilled. Fans would say, ‘ya, but the South are at a big disadvantage because the Northern Hemisphere sides are up to speed and fresh and we’re running on fumes’, whereas on the flip-side we were at an advantage in the their summer because they were at the end of their season, carrying injuries, fatigued or understrength and we’d just come out of Super Rugby and were fit and firing, but looking at the last two weekends, I’d ask, ‘what’s changed?’ You’re getting some humdingers. 33-31 between Ireland and Australia, 34-32 between New Zealand and France and while 42-28 seems like a comfortable win for South Africa against Scotland, it was anything but.

The shape of the game is changing, too, it’s far more entertaining. Remember the days when you’d routinely see 13-9, 17-14, or 15-10 scorelines. They are long gone. The narrative also changes. Take France. When they used to take what was in effect their B-Team on those mid-year tours, they were often criticised for being disrespectful to the opposition, but they’ve given the All Blacks a serious runaround in two consecutive summers and the criticism has tapered off. The Springboks seem to be following that blueprint.

If you look at Rassie’s team against Scotland last week, he made 10 changes, and he’s made wholesale changes against Wales. That would have been the French way years ago. Now fans are calling him ‘visionary’, and ahead of his time in creating depth. Both sides, with their enviable strength in depth could field two or three sides and beat most opposition. It’s funny how things that were frowned upon on a matter of years ago are now lauded.

The sanctity of Test caps

I think I’ve mentioned it before in a previous column, but it bears repeating.

There’s a wonderful clip in the late seventies of Derek Quinnell pushing his way through the crowd to get onto the National Stadium to make his debut for his country. He ran like that because he wanted to make sure he could say he had played for Wales. He would never assume he’d get another chance.

That’s how special it is to represent your country. The ultimate honour. It made me think about something Doc Craven used to say, ‘if a chap is good enough for one cap, he must be good enough for two’. What he meant was that when you pick a guy, make sure he’s around not just for one Test, but for three, five, ten and upwards because coaches should be picking long-lasting quality. It should never be a throwaway selection.

The ironic thing is there are now more capped players around than ever before. I say that, not because it’s right or wrong, but in the old days, if you were an international, everyone knew who you were. In the seventies, if you were JPR Williams, Gerald Davies and Gareth Edwards, no one came close to playing if you were fit. It was the same with Naas Botha or Danie Gerber here in South Africa. France’s Jean Pierre Rives or Ireland’s Willie John McBride. In New Zealand, you had Sean Fitzpatrick who played 63 consecutive Tests over a 12-year period and never got injured. He had Hika Reid and Warren Gatland sitting on the pine and largely that’s where they stayed. They were understudies.

Nowadays, it’s very much a 23-man squad, with Bomb Squads, Finishers and the like, but through all the changes, the sanctimony of the Test cap should remain. Yes, I’m a traditionalist, but we must be careful we don’t throw away things that have been very, very important to us. There’s a reason we have ‘Luxury Goods’ because they’re not available to everyone.

The World Cup cycle dominates the narrative

I watched this video recently where Courtney Walsh and Curtly Ambrose were talking about managing fast bowlers. What’s happening in Test cricket now is you’re bowling for short periods, maybe Tests One and Two and you’re being rested for the Third Test because the coach doesn’t want you burning out.

In the old days, fast-paced bowlers would rack up 20 or 30 overs on a Saturday and then do the same the next day, and again the following week. Walsh said, ‘in my day, I didn’t want to be rested, I wanted to bowl, because it made me bowling fit. I wouldn’t have wanted to be one of those players who sat out and then expected to perform’. Rugby selection was the same. Just get them ready for next weekend was the mantra. I read this week about a Pontypridd player Bob Penberthy who played 877 games for his club. Amazing, but they were simpler times.

When you look at these modern-day legends like Alun Wyn Jones, the most capped Test player of all-time, he played less than half that number of games. What I’m saying is coaches are now expected to think way further ahead than just the next game, they must also find depth and plan years ahead. When I coached the Springboks, the All Blacks had been top dogs for about eight years but hadn’t won a World Cup. The pundits and the scribes, said, ‘it doesn’t matter about World Cups, they’re not the most important thing, it’s about being No 1 in the world’ but nowadays, everyone is working on World Cup cycles. It influences the selection of coaches, support staff, contracts, players you bring in, the age-profile of squads. Everything is geared towards those six weeks every four years, where you hope your players are peaking and you have a squad primed to win seven consecutive games and lift the Webb Ellis Cup.

Statistics can cover up a team’s loss more than ever before

There’s a wonderful quote that goes something like ‘statistics are like a bikini; they cover the parts you don’t want everyone to see but show off the things you want people to see’. These days you can slice and dice stats whichever way you want to push your own narrative.

Coaches can always point to statistics that reflect well on their coaching. The full-time analysts will be feeding them stats in-game on possession, territory, penalties conceded and they will be briefed by a media officer to drive home the positives. I say this because if you’d looked at the stats from the South Africa versus Scotland game, you’d have thought Gregor Townsend’s men had won. Scotland kept the ball for nearly nine minutes longer than South Africa, built 50 more rucks and had a 62 per cent share of the territory. They forced the Boks to make 261 tackles and evaded 46 of them, while they made 17 line-breaks and yet they still lost by 14 points. The Fijians posted even more remarkable numbers against Wales the week before but lost by 15 points. The lesson is statistics don’t always reflect the scoreboard. In fact, far from it.

Searching for the perfect game

There’s a deeper element I want the reader to understand. Rugby is the only ball sport you can win without the ball. You can take any metric; most line breaks, post-contact metres, metres carried, whatever, that’s why you play with the ball, but this is the debate. You could argue the game isn’t structured in a way where you get rewarded for having the ball. Clearly, the law makers and rugby’s hierarchy are always looking for the perfect game, one where the team who has the ball is rewarded but it’s never straightforward. In the George Gregan and Stephen Larkham’s era, the Brumbies would keep hold of the ball for 20 phases, before scoring and that led to comments and probably complaints from the opposition that it was too difficult to get their hands on the ball.

The law makers brought in tweaks at the breakdown, like the jackal, to reward the defending team, allowing them to turn the ball over and clear their lines. Now that last 10 metres of the field has become a tactical battle in itself. These days, we talk about conversion rates. When you get into the ‘red zone’, you’re judged on, ‘points per entry’ which means you either take the three and kick for the poles or kick to the corner and bank on a driving maul or going through phase play to pick up five or seven points.

Try-line defence these days is incredible. Defences are so much better on your goal line than they have ever been because the defender has been taught how to roll an attacker on his back and hold them up. It was never a skill taught in the old days. I saw Ronan O’Gara recently talking about coaches being brought in specifically to coach players in that last 10m of the field, which means ballooning coaching teams. You have lineout coaches, breakdown coaches, throwing-in coaches, psychology coaches, S&C coaches and so on. It’s not surprising when the result of games are decided by millimetres!

As ever, I’d love to know your thoughts.