I recently watched a DVD in which Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May all decided to burn up the eco-diesel they’d mistakenly made by entering a 24 hour car race. This involved buying a diesel car, stripping it, and then turning it into a racing car.
Fortunately for them they had Steve, the magician that runs their technical garage, and he knew what he was doing, and managed to put a car together, and then also managed, with the help of other people who also knew what they were doing, to rebuild it twice after something broke and Richard crashed it into half million pound racing car, but that’s all besides the point really.
After the first racing stint a small part, some kind of ratchet flange, whatsit, fuel injector thing, broke on the car; (i clearly know a lot about cars) and of course it stopped working, and had to be towed back to the pits.
It seems bizarre that a finely tuned racing car can be brought to a standstill by the failure of one part the size of a potato chip, and that is also probably why I’ve spent so much time parked next to the road staring at my engine looking like I actually know what I’m looking at.
The problem is, sometimes the small parts are also the most difficult to find, ask any mechanic. If more than one small part goes awry then you’re up a paddle with no creek, because it will take three times as long to find and when you eventually do, and fix it, then the other small dysfunctional ratchet flange will break.
A rugby team is also a finely tuned machine, like a car has wheels and an engine; a rugby team has a forward pack and a backline. The two cannot, however, work in isolation; there need to be linkages between the two. For the engine to effectively kick the wheels in motion there needs to be a drive shaft, a gear box, and these days, a highly advanced electronic engine management system.
If the wheels aren’t adequately powered by the driveshaft, they’ll just flounder around going nowhere.
They’ll just sit there, being useless…
And that’s what I think happened to the Springbok team in New Zealand. A few small parts have been underperforming, and others have been crow-barred into slots that they’re simply not designed for. A rugby team is supposed to be greater than the sum of all its parts, and if some of those parts are faulty or incorrectly fitted, the whole machine suffers or simply doesn’t work at all. The solution to this problem may be to replace the faulty parts where necessary and perhaps more importantly, make sure that certain purpose built parts are where they are supposed to be and not jammed in somewhere where they serve no real purpose, as has been the case with Jean de Villiers.
Some members of the team need to be given a break and re-tooled so that they can come back leaner, stronger and faster and the electronic management system (the coaching staff, for those of you who don’t get the link) should perhaps consider adding a high performance Eddie Jones or Pieter Rossouw backline chip to give the team a bit more speed on the top end.
I know it’s fairly obvious, but a car, and a rugby team, need someone with a brain, preferably one in working order, to drive it, give it direction and then keep it on the road to it’s destination, but as we all know, even the best driver can get lost or have an accident, and one hopes that next time, they’ll remember the way or call someone who’s been there before for directions.
Article by Ryan Quirk
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