RUGBY NEWS - The public uncertainty over the fate of Allister Coetzee as Springbok coach has finally come to an end, but even it if hadn’t been concluded with last week’s announcement, there would be no need for South African rugby fans to panic.
Rassie Erasmus, in his position as the national Director of Rugby, was always going to be in charge in 2018, regardless of whether Coetzee had stayed on or not. That is what people in that position do. They take charge. The hiring and firing of coaches effectively becomes their responsibility (although that was conveniently forgotten by Western Province when Gert Smal was courting John Mitchell in 2015), and the coach is answerable to him or her.
Coetzee objected to being entrusted with a “ceremonial” coaching role, but that is not really what it would have been, and Coetzee is not new to working under a Director of Rugby. Indeed, his best years as a coach coincided with him being a coach who worked under a director.
His Stormers team finished in the top two of Super Rugby when Erasmus was effectively the WP director in 2010 and 2011, and his recovery from a slump that coincided with his years going it alone as Stormers coach came when Smal was director in 2014 and 2015.
Coetzee was effectively demoted by WP in those years, and that would have been one of the reasons he left to coach in Japan at the end of 2015. It’s his right to object to once again serving under a boss but that was something he knew about quite early last year.
Coetzee does have strengths as a coach but he also has limitations, and failing to recognise that he is not on the same level from a tactical and technical viewpoint as someone like Erasmus was perhaps his undoing.
He did make gains early in 2017 by bringing in the tactically astute Brendan Venter. There were improvements in the initial parts of last season, but for some reason (did Coetzee perhaps feel he was not getting enough credit?) Venter’s influence appeared to wane later on.
Venter is a brain that should not be ignored. Although Erasmus and Jacques Nienaber are quite far down the road towards preparing for the England series in June, something they started when they were still working together at Irish province Munster, it would be remiss of them to completely ignore something that Venter suggested last week on Twitter.
