The damning truth about Davids
2 Feb 2006
Lardy Davids left Cape Town last year huffing and puffing that he’d been done a dirty by Western Province and the Stormers.
Sycophantic publications screamed racism, and Davids was quick to seize the opportunity to label Nick Mallett, Kobus van der Merwe and his coaching team as discriminatory. Racism, he said, was alive and well at Newlands.
In Gloucester he found a heavyweight club in the demanding English Premiership. He found a coach and management team that backed him. He spoke about the prestige of the club and his desire to prove his detractors wrong.
“One of the key issues about signing Quinton is that he was prepared to prove himself. There’s a longer-term deal on the table for him if he can show what he’s worth. We want people to be driven by performance, and I’m delighted that he’s got that attitude,â€? Gloucester head coach Dean Ryan gloated soon after Davids’ signing.
The words were backed up by action. Davids was hauled over a month earlier in order to get him fit. The shocking indictment that was a horrendously out of shape rugby player at the peak of South Africa’s domestic season was passed over, a fresh start was promised.
Away from the political turmoil that had shrouded his career, Lardy Davids wanted to be judged as a rugby player. Now he has been. Gloucester have played 13 games this season, Lardy has started two and come off the bench in one.
Gloucester purchased Davids because of a liability at lock. Adam Eustace (13 appearances) and Alex Brown (nine appearances) are not of international quality. They are solid club players, and they are deemed to be better than Davids.
Davids can no longer pull the race card, for to do so reveals the stark truth of his career. The colour of his skin did not deny him opportunity in South African rugby, the reality is it made a club player into a Springbok.
Davids sought to rid the disguise of colour, but all it revealed was a player filled with excuses. There is no accountability in Davids’ mind, and the countless coaches who have embarked to get the player into acceptable physical condition is the damning legacy of potential unfulfilled.
Davids played 37 times for the Stormers, where he felt he was not judged as a rugby player. At Gloucester he has been, and his 23% appearance rate is reflective of a player whose ability and attitude reflect the amateur he always should have been.
102 Comments
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3 Feb 2006, 19:28 pm
ci mohr, the lads are referring to the pre-season warm-up friendlies where our lot regularly give yours a real pasting. For example when the Stormers thrashed the Newport Gwent Dragons in Dubai last year. Even the useless Sharks kicked the **** out of the Harlequins.
You surely can’t be saying that English club rugby is better than the Super 14, can you? Give me the number of the dude who sells you your LSD, quick.
4 Feb 2006, 16:58 pm
I know you’re a long way away from Europe, but surely you’ve realised that the Dragons are WELSH (principality joined onto England but not currently part of it), and Harlequins were relegated from the English Premiership and are part of our second tier of clubs. Yes, I absolutely stick to my view that the GP is the most competitive league around and I think that any of the top half dozen English clubs would fancy most Super 14 teams under English conditions, and they’d certainly have no trouble with the SA ones! The packs would destroy your sides (assuming that we had a Northern hemisphere ref that didn’t see the scrum as simply a way of restarting the game as in RL), and I doubt you’d cope with the defences. Sadly, the different seasons prevent us from ever really knowing, but I’ll enjoy the S14 as I always do. However, I’ll still see it as more akin to 15-a-side 7s – exciting but not the real thing!
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