Oval Office June 2007

Is it time to drop the field goal?

Exclusive by Grant Batty

They say rugby is a game made in heaven and played in heaven. And if you’ve got any doubts about it, just ask young Francois Steyn whose prodigious boot lifted the Springboks out of the mire and into the winners circle in their Tri-nations opener against Australia.

From a Wallaby perspective his two last gasp field goals were heartbreakers. From a Springbok point of view they were sublime. From Steyn’s point of view they were simply heaven sent.
Asked after the game about his talent for spotting three point opportunities and locking them in with radar-like precision, Steyn’s modest reply was: “I don’t know. God just moves me around the field like a pawn!”

That’s great isn’t it? Now, with the World Cup just around the corner, the Springboks have worked out how to have 16 people on the field instead of 15!

Actually that’s not quite true. They’ve known about it for decades.

One of the great exponents of invoking celestial assistance was the late Dr Danie Craven under whose devout guidance the Springbok star shone for three generations.

The Doc ran a tight ship and he was a man of strong religious belief.

One of his foibles was that he used to invite his players to join him in prayer before big matches and then they went out to flog the opposition senseless safe in the conviction they were merely doing God’s will.

But poor old Danie came undone before a relatively minor match.

His beloved Stellenbosch University was playing a Combined Services team and, as was his practice, he shared a few devotional moments with the Uni players before leaving the dressing shed. Unfortunately, on his way out he was accosted by the captain of Combined Services who made the not unreasonable request they he also lead them in prayer before the game.

To his credit The Doc reluctantly agreed but he abandoned the tradition immediately afterwards because, in his own words, “he had put God in an awful position!”

But the strong Calvinstic streak that has permeated South African rugby for years lived on long after Craven had gone to meet the great coach in the sky.

Take Rudolph Straueli for instance. He carried a bible in one hand and a big stick in the other.

The architect of the now infamous pre-World Cup 2003 Springbok boot camp, Straueli used to encourage daily bible-reading classes among his players to keep them on the straight and narrow.
Quite how he reconciled this with the brutality of his boot camp is hard to imagine but one can only speculate the rationale went something like this.

“OK you guys, listen up.

“This week we’re going into the bush and when we get there you are going to take all your clothes off and jump in and out of pools of muddy water which will, incidentally, be surrounded by barbed wire fences.

“And, oh yes, if a rogue hippo happens grab you by what’s left of your dangly bits after you’ve scaled the barbed wire and got into the water, it’s God’s will because He knows exactly what you were thinking about when you were chatting up that surfie chick down at Clifton Beach at the weekend.”

Luckily for the Boks, and their future generations, old Rudy didn’t last too long before he was replaced by the somewhat more benign Jake White.

And that brings me back to Francois Steyn and what could become Jake’s worst World Cup nightmare.

You can sort of imagine Jake taking young Francois aside before the final against the All Blacks at Stade Francaise and suggesting very gently that he execrcises due caution when carrying out God’s invocations.

Because, if he misses with the boot a minute or two before the final siren, and the ball goes down Daniel Carter’s throat instead he, and the rest of the Springboks, are going to be in very deep trouble indeed.

Francois will, of course, listen attentively, nod sagely and then go off and do exactly what Jake asked him not to do because God cannot be ignored.

Here’s the hypothetical scenario again.

God is in his big box in the sky giving Charles Darwin his weekly counselling session when he suddenly realises the big game is on. So he goes across to the next cloud and switches on the very wide screen TV to watch little Francois in action.

It’s a bit quiet, a typical Test match forward tussle and God’s attention is drawn to the Bok forwards ... Victor Matfield, Schalk Burger and Gurthro Steenkamp in particular ... and suddenly it dawns on him with agonising clarity.

After eons of time he was wrong and Charles Darwin was right. The evidence of Charlie’s theory of evolution is there, right before his very eyes. He is looking at the precursors of modern man. The result is God slips into deep depression, goes for counselling and abandons young Francois to his own devices.

The results are predictable.

A directionless Steyn forgets what White pleaded with him to do and tries a last minute drop. Misses. Carter grabs the ball, scythes through the Bok line and returns the compliment with deadly accuracy.

The All Blacks take the World Cup and the Springboks are left scratching their heads with their hindlegs and wondering what the hell went wrong.

And that brings me to the point of all of this. Perhaps it’s time the rule makers took a look at field goals and the influence they are having on the outcomes of Test matches.

One point and not three might be the way to go!