But Graham Henry has taken THREE full test teams not for a tame little hit around against Italy or Romania, but for a Grand Slam end-of-season tour when his men were all clapped out after whitewashing the British Lions and then wrapping up the 3N with only one defeat in the whole season.

All three of those Grand Slam teams won their tests and accomplished the grand slam mission, including putting England away at Twickenham.

And this is two years out from the Rugby World Cup — now that speaks of proper planning. Not “resting” your key players and handing a full test jersey a bunch of aspirant second-raters who are out of their depth and **** it all up and lose their “gimme” test and so blight the jersey they wear!

PROPER planning means you don’t concede test defeats. Not under ANY circumstances. You might not win each test by massive margins by carefully blooding new test players, but you do not, ever, plan to “build a team” if it involves losing tests on the indelible permanent record.

how can you tell me that young ruan pienaar is better then the experienced and skiller ricky janurie, or that Jaco is better then percy. or that Schalk is better then Smit, we need a captain. i’ll reserve my opinion on this matter
but maclaren is an ***.

dont got me wrong i like the fancy stuff to, and the sharks are playing great rugby.

nice rebuttal.

thankfully for SA Rugby, dickie muir and Jake (to a lesser extent) aren’t as introspective.

BUT If a SA youngster decides to go the rugby route, he can’t make a decent living off club rugby (and then his career is only ten years). He must be the best in the province or live like a pauper. And when his rugby career is over he must have made millions to be able to retire or buy a business, or become a salesman and move to the townships.

The net result is that when a clever SA youngster who can play is faced with the choice: Rugby or University, there is realy only one choice. Rugby (and perhaps coaching too?) is then left to those not-so-sharp knives with bulging muscles in the box to see if they can eke a living out of it. Only very few of our professional ruby players nowadays can claim to have degrees, or even be capable of getting them. In the old days of amauteur rugby, the doctors and lawyers played Bok rugby in their spare time for fun. This is not possible nowdays because of the time and conditionng required.

Sorry man I have been working up a storm

is it friday yet…this is ridiculous it sure as noodle doesn’t feel like a 4 day week.

We haven’t had a single article since 7am…

What the **** is going on?!!!!

They have no shortage of real quality loosies either. Smith’s a master. Lyons is a great No.8.

And their backs? Gregan, Larkham, Giteau, Mortlock, Tuqiri… As good or better than any team in the world.

Only two things missing – a front row and DEPTH.

Where you been mate?!!!!

if you read any of this, you’ve still got a **** team.

McCaw is a superb player, close to one of the best of all-time, amazingly refined and modern player, massive difference to any team, but we simply do not have a player like McCaw.

We have Schalk Burger, what he lacks in refinement he makes up for in guts, workrate and physicality. Different styles. Its not stupid rugby and we fielded a pretty decent national team for the last 2 years. What would be stupid is to try and change to a playing strategy to a style that is counter-intuitive to our talents.