Going nowhere slowly
25 Oct 2010
RYAN VREDE thinks it is a travesty that the Springbok selectors have completely ignored scientific guidelines on player conditioning when picking Victor Matfield.
I cringed when Matfield was announced as the tour captain. My distress wasn’t a reflection of my estimation of his capacity to lead, but rather born from a deep concern about his physical condition and, more pertinently, his future value to the Springboks.
Matfield has played more rugby than any player in South Africa. He was rested for one Super Rugby fixture, and inexplicably played the mid-year Tests against Italy. During the Tri-Nations he was a shadow of the dominant player he had been in 2009. I can’t recall seeing him delivering as laboured a performance as what he did in the Currie Cup semi-final. Despite the four-week conditioning camp he had just come off, he looked a spent force.
Now he will be tasked with lifting his performance for what the Springbok coaching staff has deemed a crucial Grand Slam tour. It is against the background of a diabolical season that a tour that was initially meant to offer exhausted players a much-needed rest, now becomes one geared towards ensuring that Peter de Villiers and his assistants make it to the World Cup in 2011.
Matfield is the prized sacrificial lamb that De Villiers hopes will contribute significantly towards appeasing his rugby gods (read: South African Rugby Union bosses).
Certainly there are others who need a break – Schalk Burger, Morné Steyn and Bryan Habana chief among those – while Ricky Januarie would benefit from a conditioning programme tailored for him. But none of that quartet is in the very twilight of their careers, and the latter trio are backline players who take significantly less contact that the 33-year-old lock does.
I can’t see Matfield’s conditioning improving significantly enough for him to reach the World Cup in optimum condition. The 2011 Super Rugby season, an extended one, is his last for the Bulls. He will insist on playing every game and the Bulls’ coaching and conditioning staff will offer little or no resistance, despite their assurances to Springbok conditioning coach Neels Liebel that the national interest will be given greater priority than it has in years past.
Prior to the first home Tri-Nations Test at Soccer City against the All Blacks, Liebel was given the implicit directive to silence the media’s criticism of patently fatigued players (Matfield among those) by offering a plethora of elaborate statistics and data collected from an expensively acquired GPS monitoring system. Liebel said elite rugby players where capable of playing between 1 400 and 1 600 minutes before their performance dropped markedly. Matfield has far exceeded that total.
Two weeks later in Pretoria De Villiers told the media: ‘…something is wrong with Victor’, and after the Test at Loftus he said that Matfield (and John Smit): ‘…didn’t know what it was like to feel good anymore’, in response to questions about their conditioning. He would then play both men against Australia a week later. Now Matfield will again be strapped on to De Villiers’ chariot and asked to haul him into a battle on three legs.
What then is the point of conditioning measurements when they are wilfully ignored? De Villiers, along with the rugby bosses who retained him after a post Tri-Nations review then pressured him into selecting senior players running on empty, will all need to be held to account when fatigue adversely affects key senior players’ (Matfield one of the most important) attempts to mount a successful title defence.
Perhaps if De Villiers and Liebel bothered to check the reading on Matfield’s GPS they would have seen the warning that read: Going nowhere slowly.
Follow SA Rugby mag on Twitter
74 Comments
Pages: « 1 [2] Show All
25 Oct 2010, 14:44 pm
@WP Till I Die(WP-Forever)-38: hahahaha
the Power of the archives!
GO TRANSIE
25 Oct 2010, 14:45 pm
@WP Till I Die(WP-Forever)-50:
With a full strength team you guys must be favourites.
25 Oct 2010, 15:36 pm
@WP Till I Die(WP-Forever)-38: hhehehe indeed
25 Oct 2010, 17:05 pm
Transie
watch those archives now, y’hear. Wouldnt want to be caught out cherrypicking only the Transformation-relevant pieces now, would you.
?!
25 Oct 2010, 18:01 pm
To Peter De Villiers
I am no longer surprised by your blatant ineptness and downright stupidity. You are a proper clown. Thank you for slowly destroying what those before you achieved. You are a fool.
To the PDV fans on this site.
I am sure that most of you have already quietened quite considerably and to those that have not, I take pity.
They say that the empty can rattles the most, eh!
25 Oct 2010, 18:19 pm
Interesting to nb, in hindsight, how the rest/rotation policy by ABs was mocked after RWC’07 despite being praised by the same people in 2006. Now the wheel has turned and it appears to be the ‘smart’ option again…..or is it ?
NZs current approach to rest-periods:-
“Richie McCaw and Kieran Read are other members of the squad to have bypassed provincial duty for Canterbury, leading Henry to acknowledge many of his players may be lacking sharpness when they attempt to increase their record transtasman winning streak to 11.
“They are a bit under done but we have to get the balance right,” he said.
“Over the next 12 months they have a huge amount of rugby to play. They’ve got five tests [now], Super rugby pre-season, Super rugby, four tests [Tri-Nations] and then the World Cup. It’s just madness if they try and play all the time.”
The All Blacks were in camp for three days before departure, a stark contrast to the Wallabies who assembled in Sydney three weeks ago.”.
25 Oct 2010, 18:29 pm
BP 56, I think Jake White got it right, he cut out the high intensity tests pre-World Cup and had a full complement of players to call on for the WC. NZ overplayed Carter and he was playing injured in the crunch game.
25 Oct 2010, 18:36 pm
Only a ret@rded clown would not give Matfield a rest.
25 Oct 2010, 18:39 pm
Black Panther #56. i’d like to think Henry’s approach was mocked because HE admitted it was a ‘mistake’!
25 Oct 2010, 19:19 pm
Lord Barry @ 57 (ps – what happened to the reply function, again ?)
Nice of you to, finally, acknowledge DCs injury at the RWC.
Im not sure you can he was ‘overplayed’ tho as he had picked up that injury only at the end of TriN’07. He was then rested in the RWC Group matches but was clearly not right for France but played nevertheless (he’s a tough little b@stard too). It was, however, bad luck that Nick Evans suffered a new injury 10mins after being subbed on for DC in Cardiff. Evans remains a huge loss for the ABs as none of Cruden/Slade – let alone The Duck – have anything like his game at Test level.
So it was as much bad luck that both DC and Evans were off within 10mins of each other early in 2ndH in Cardiff. Which seems to be conveniently forgotten in the whole “why didnt ABs/McCaw take the DG ?” barbs.
25 Oct 2010, 19:52 pm
Transie
Henry has never been slow to acknowledge his mistakes or issue apologies where warranted. He might appear sour (in fact, its usually his humour, misinterpreted) but he was raised on old-school behaviour and practises it too. But we’re still waiting 1 from Krustys long list of Disrespectful BS, let alone anything from Jake the Snake and his carefully-managed “cheat” jibes pre-RWC’07. And, of course, Hell will freeze over before anyone from SA Management ever acknowledges the Justice4 was a mistake.
It would, nevertheless, take some doing to trump our Dear SANZAR Partners who watched their stadiums FILL on the prospect of full-strength visitors in TriN’07, only to then send the leftover reprobates, stealthly-armed with pre-ordained “cheat” accusation tactics, to foreign shores with nothing other than a smear campaign in mind and a large F.U. to their supporters.
And isnt it funny to read how NZ is – somehow – manufacturing the playing-field thru rule-changes and a ‘conspiracy of referees’ and, yet, 2007 was clearly contrived in the advantage of the eventual Champions through a selfish policy of convenience.
BH – did you like Our Stephens article in the Sunday Times ? yes, I always read it for a joke too, the Funnies section is just not up to the mark these days. Anyway, it was intended to be an article about how England is placed on the eve of the EOYT. Unfortunately it ended up being a paranoid diatribe about all-things NZ and how the landscape has been manufactured for their RWC. Focussing on the Rule Change at the breakdown, apparently even the Aussies “rolled over” on this to NZ……… funny how the same Sports section included a LONG list of UK journalists and coaches (incl B.Venter at Saracens – hardly the man who dishes out praise) and I.McGeechan, have ALL lauded the same Rules as being so positive for the game.
*sigh*
25 Oct 2010, 20:49 pm
61. BLACK PANTHER(BLACK PANTHER): geez, all of a sudden i get a lecture on how upstanding father ted is
you moaned that his strategy was mocked and i told you why i think he was derided. Nothing more nothing less.
Pdv might be hardegat but he has admitted to some of his tactical faux pas without provocation, but i’m really not interested in making comparisons between the two. GH said he made a mistake & everyone jumped on him, period!
25 Oct 2010, 21:06 pm
Peter de Villiers is ‘n poephol!!!
Ek is seker Jerome Paarwater sal meer met die Bokke uitgerig kry as hy!!
25 Oct 2010, 23:09 pm
Come now, Transie. Arent you the man who is always flooding us with a deluge of archived material or quotes from yesteryear to magnify our slightest misdemeanours in to Grand Canyon’esque errors ?
Take one on the chin. For once.
Ive never seen Krusty apologise once. His greatest surprise remains his ability to ridicule the previously-accepted rule that white Afrikaaner males had the outright monopoly on Arrogance.
26 Oct 2010, 00:04 am
Ryan,
On this occasion I have to disagree with you. Ideally I agree that the players like Matfield and Habana etc should be rested but that is not what is the real world. The Boks were smashed in the 2010 Tri-nations. PDV and the coaches plus the players themselves (including Matfield and other stalwarts) were well below their best or simply did not perform. The onus is now to get the Boks to win again. I understand the fatigue issues, but not completely. The Kiwis are taking a full strength team and there is no talk of fatigue or the rest required before the RWC which is still 11 months away.
The players who were supposed to be playing at optimum level in the tri-nations but failed abysmally have a second chance to redeem themselves. It will do more for their confidence to go out there and play their hearts out and win rather than be rested at home with a 1-5 result from the trinations staring at their faces throughout the holidays until next year.
This tour is about redemption and winning back our pride. The best players are needed. For those that are injured, thats the way it is. They can get fit and be ready for next year. Brussouw and Du Preez are needed at their best if we are to have any chance of winning the rwc.
PDV is not my favourite man right now, but neither is John Smit or Matfield or Bakkies, or Jaque Fourie, or Habana or Spies and the many who underperformed.
This tour will define the Boks. It will be do or die.
If I was there, I would be readying myself for battle and blood!
No guts no glory
Go Bokke Go!
26 Oct 2010, 00:18 am
Only time will tell wether this is a mistake or not. I think its insane to overplay players before the RWC. Pdiddy has seen the writing on the wall, winning RWC or not, and wants to go out with a Grand slam.
Remember also, that the players get to select themsleves, and with financial incentives, they will never rest but keep pulling in the mullah.
Cant wait to see the youngsters get a run, just hope the senior players pull their weight.
26 Oct 2010, 05:54 am
The Boks are drinking in the Last Chance Saloon and, because they flopped totally in 3N, have no choice but to seek some sort of minor redemption on this EOYT.
But, if this year’s EOYT goes anything like last year’s huge fiasco, the swing-doors of their saloon will knock them — and their coach — lights out and with permanent rugby brain damage.
Might as well withdraw from RWC2011 to “pursue other interests” and just hand the cup over to the rightful owners, pilgrims!
26 Oct 2010, 06:05 am
Tackles, jy vroeg begin drink vandag?
We all know that PDivvie can be knocked down, lights out, kaput, moertoe and nothing will happen.
As for ‘rightful owners’, bwhahahahahahahaha! Why not try and win it fairly at least once before you claim that?
26 Oct 2010, 06:39 am
64. BLACK PANTHER(BLACK PANTHER): alright BP as long as you acknowledge that you just swung at me without provocation, it’s cool.
Graham Henry saying his rest strategy was a mistake is not an apology, he is just admitting the error of his judgement! It’s not for you to hear or see pdv apologising, he is not the new zealand coach, is he?
26 Oct 2010, 06:56 am
@67 THETACKLER
The pressure is going to be on the AB’s big time next year – particularly in their own backyard.
Things happen in a major tournament, you know. Hey, you might end up with a decent draw and luck ends up going your way.
But things can also go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go….
Wouldn’t like to be in your shoes then.
26 Oct 2010, 07:20 am
Oh dear, same old, same old; even old Blek Panter who starts off quite reasonable then degenrates into his usual defensive bluster. He tries to defend cunning and gamesmanship on the part of NZ, who are trying to maintain their honour (!) by whatever means possible in the face of a good few coughs and splutters in RWC’s over the years.
Blek, we agree, NZ is THE team to beat. They have everything; even Boss Capo O’ Bumchum. Henry’s 2007 “resting” policy didn’t cause NZ to lose to France. It was a few injuries, being unsettled by a rabid France and the ever dodgy ref – against NZ for once. Truly the AB’s choked that game. Surely they have to win next year?
26 Oct 2010, 09:19 am
You write a compelling article about PDV autonomous hold on the Springboks. I am no PDV fan, but if it was another coach sitting in the same position, they would have done the same thing. (Maybe another coach wouldn’t have found himself in this dire strait, but that is an argument for another day.
I personally am hoping the home unions dish out a collective hiding so that we can see the back of this clown.
By putting an overworked, under achieving, Matfield in the side could have been the best thing to serve this purpose.
I feel for Matfield in this regard as he might just have to bear the brunt of the public as PDV shifts the blame once more.
Looking forward to the World Cup, if Matfield and co. can get the rest they deserve and our injured stars like Fourie du Preez and Heinrich Brussouw can find their 2009 form, we will be in with a chance of winning. (Even with our clown of a coach)
26 Oct 2010, 23:31 pm
PdV is not only not going to win the grand slam, by playing the senior Springboks in Europe, but is also guaranteeing that not only will we not win the World Cup, but we will finish way down the log.
30 Oct 2010, 21:20 pm
what a pile of bullshit. Victor Matfield will be fine by 06 November and ready to play. JOhn Smit is past it anyway and needs to go home.
Boks will win every game or my ***** a kipper. wait and see.
Pages: « 1 [2] Show All
Have your say
You must be logged in to post a comment.