SA Rugby is a sporting family like no other

The Springboks’ impressive beating of Argentina in the Rugby Championship last weekend did a great job at summing up their mother body, SA Rugby’s efficiency. The win has put the Boks in a position where they can still win the Championship after the final round of fixtures this weekend.
They will, however, need Australia’s helping hand. That’s because the Wallabies need to stop the log-leading New Zealand in Auckland tomorrow, which would make the Springboks champions, should they manage another win against Argentina in Durban later in the day.
The All Blacks are just above the Springboks on point difference, going into tomorrow’s season finale.
It took some doing by Jacques Nienaber’s world champions to get to this position. They scored five tries in Buenos Aires last Saturday to bag a crucial, bonus-point 36-20 win. That was after they shook off the shock media report that alleged that some of them had tested positive for a recreational drug – cocaine, to be specific.
Nienaber admitted after the match that the timing of the report – which was rubbished by all and sundry at SA Rugby – was rather curious. So serious was the match they were about to play when that damning report hit the internet that Nienaber described it as a semi-final.
But its publication mattered very little in the end, as the Boks still managed to get the crucial win.
In the week leading up to that game, SA Rugby announced the appointment of Sandile Ngcobo as the new Springbok Sevens coach. He takes over from Neil Powell – his former coach at the Blitzboks – after the latter’s glittering nine-year reign.
Powell bowed out after having made the Blitzboks one of the most potent sevens teams in the world, helping them to three World Series titles, among other major titles.
The choice to have 33-year-old Ngcobo succeed him speaks volumes of the mother body’s succession plans. It articulates their will to put faith in young talent and to lead the transformation project. It also says they’ve learnt from their own success, as Powell is an ex-Blitzbok himself.
One of the things I loved most about Powell, who will now work as Director of Rugby at the Sharks, is his insistence that his team’s success was always down to its execution of the their “systems”.
Incidentally, it is the systems that Springbok captain Siya Kolisi also credited for their win over Argentina.

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