After Saturday’s Test I heard some worryingly familiar lines from some of my trusted rugby muses. 

“I just wish we had lost so that we’d be rid of the coach”

Excuse me, but what did you say?

The Springboks won a particularly tight Test without ever looking up for the game.  There’s a saying that winners don’t know how to lose - and I think it’s particularly relevent to what we saw from the Boks in Edinburgh on Saturday.

Now I’m not, for one second, hailing the game a triumph for PdV’s tactics and selection process.  I am, however, saying that the furore surrounding the performance are premature and unfair.  Here are some reasons why I think the critism has been a little harsh.

1)  The Boks never look good up north.  Not an excuse or, really, acceptable but a fact regardless of how we’d like to see them play.  Mallett’s record hunters, Streauli’s record breakers (think Murrayfield and Twickenham) and Jake White’s Grand Slam contenders (the Tri-Nations champs of ’04 were among the worst we’ve seen travel north) have all flattered to deceive.  Blame the cold or blame fatigue - it’s one of those age-old rugby truisms (much like SA teams can’t win overseas in the S14) that needs to be broken somehow.

2)  Disrupting injuries.  Losing Fourie du Preez in the build-up and Bismarck du Plessis in the first five minutes clearly affected the momentum and structure of the Boks.  A professional team should be able to handle setbacks like this - which they just about did, but it certainly affected the momentum.  I’m a long-standing admirer of Ricky Januarie - so what I say here mustn’t be misinterpreted - but the nuggety number nine had a real shocker in Edinburgh.  Fourie du Preez’s protection of Ruan Pienaar and ability to keep the pack going foreward were sorely missed.  Januarie’s ability to scrap in the tight games is great, but his slow service cost the Boks and he was clearly off the pace after not having played for over a month.  Likewise the attention and planning that went into the Smit move were assigned to the scrap heap when du Plessis limped off.

3)  Referees from the North.  The ELVs and the way they have been phased in has been disasterous.  Their implementation by referees is a joke.  Northern Hemisphere refs have been instructed to watch players going off their feet at ruck time and are blowing the attacking teams out of the water.  It’s obviously their way to counter what they perceive to be a conspiracy from Australia and New Zealand to promote a free-flowing and attacking game.  The new rules have been a shambles from start to finish, but surely they weren’t designed to penalise teams that get numbers to the ball at pace with an absence of defenders?  While Saturday’s ref didn’t have an obvious agenda against the Boks (ala Monseiur Rolland the week before), he also clearly didn’t know what was going on.  His decision to just penalise one team per half, though, did make for an exciting game.  They should rather experiment with getting all refs to blow the same set of laws than keep changing the stupid things.  Anyway, rant over.

There are some selections and decisions being made by the Springbok coach and management at the moment that I don’t agree with.  Sure there are - everyone in the country ‘knows’ better.

Trying to squeeze three consecutive games out of the same 22 is rather bizarre. Personally I would have given Fourie, Kankowski, Steyn, Bekker, Nokwe, Brussouw and Rossouw  a chance to stretch their legs and show why they were included in the touring squad.  They chose to stick with their squad and now they’ve got more questions than answers heading down to Twickenham.  Habana is way off form, the front row is decimated and the team have had another game drained from the tank.

The truth is it was a very, very average performance from a team way off their best.  At 10-0 down, and with nothing going right for them, the Boks did manage to pull together and squeeze out  a gutsy second half to beat very passionate, and desperate, Scotland team.

I was at Murrayfield in 2002 and I wish that Springbok team had done the same thing