NAN-S-8
Rugby
Cape Town, Oct. 14, 2016 (Reuters/NAN) South African rugby is “rotten from the bottom up and top down’’ according to Joel Stransky, whose drop goal sealed their greatest triumph when they won the 1995 World Cup on home soil.
That emotional extra-time victory over the All Blacks in front of Nelson Mandela, and another World Cup triumph in 2007, underlined South Africa’s re-emergence as one of the sport’s superpowers.
But those heady days are starting to acquire a sepia tinge in the wake of their recent woes.
Stransky added that the sport would need radical reform if the current slump is to be reversed.
Last year they lost at home to Argentina and Ireland for the first time, to Japan at the World Cup and followed up with defeat to the Pumas this August during a ragged Rugby Championship.
Things reached their nadir last Saturday with the humiliating record 57-15 capitulation to New Zealand in Durban.
With their next fixture coming against a resurgent England at Twickenham in November, South African rugby has to face up to some painful questions.
Coach Allister Coetzee, whose four wins from nine games in charge gives him the second-worst win percentage after the dark days of Carel du Plessis in 1997.
Coetzee was quick to blame the country’s domestic system as he tried to explain the crushing defeat and Stransky agrees.
“You cannot look at 2016 in isolation; it is a problem that has been coming for some time.
“And you need to look at the game holistically from grassroots level to the top,’’ Stransky, now a respected pundit and businessman, told Reuters.
“The kids coming out of school do not have the same skill-set as in other countries, or are as well coached.
The education system plays a major role in that. (Reuters/NAN)
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(Edited by Emmanuel Okara/Peter Ejiofor)