LIONS TOUR TO SOUTH AFRICA:THE ILL-FEELING arising from incidents in last Saturday's 28-25 victory for South Africa in the second Test in Pretoria was hardly assuaged here yesterday by Pieter de Villiers. If nothing else though, the slightly madcap meanderings of the Springbok head coach were certainly entertaining as his press conference resembled an eyebrow-raising convention.
The lunchtime rendezvous had afforded de Villiers the opportunity to retract his ludicrous assertion that Schalk Burger didn’t deserve a yellow card or a citing for gouging Luke Fitzgerald.
But despite the eight-week ban imposed on the Boks flanker, as well as Bakkies Botha’s two-week suspension for dangerously charging at Adam Jones (who suffered a dislocated shoulder), de Villiers singularly declined to do so in a rambling defence of a favoured player he admits to building his team around.
The disciplinary hearings into the citings against Burger and Botha began at midday local time (11am Irish) in Pretoria on Sunday, broke up at 3pm and reconvened in Johannesburg at 5.30pm before the Burger suspension was finally announced around 1am.
Both are ruled out of the third Test here next Saturday unless they appeal, which de Villiers did not rule out.
The Springbok flanker escaped with only a yellow card from French referee Christophe Berdos – a decision taken on the advice of New Zealand touchjudge Bryce Lawrence, who spotted the offence. One ventures that the fact the incident happened seconds after kick-off contributed to saving Burger’s bacon, as it were. It brought to mind the failure of the officials to red-card Joost van der Westhuizen for kicking Malcolm O’Kelly early in what became known as the Battle of Pretoria in the same Loftus Versfeld in 1998.
Asked if he was against foul play, de Villiers said: “I am against anything that’s not in the spirit of the game, anything. We won’t go to the lows of being negative in the sense of positive games. We have got brilliant players in this country; they are world-class, most of them.
“If we want to eye-gouge any lions we go down the bush veldt, like we normally do, and eye-gouge them and see if they can run. But we will never, never encourage anybody to be negative or bring the game into disrepute.
“What Schalk’s nature and character is, if you know the man as I know him,” continued de Villiers, “I think he is more physical than any other rugby player in the world. To go to that kind of measures to show he is the boss on the rugby field, he will never do it and I don’t think he did it. We don’t want to accuse Schalk, we stand and abide by what’s happening.
“As punches, as head-butting, as spear tackles, all those things don’t belong in the game. We want to promote this game among our youth, everybody to see how passionate we are about this game and we want to bring that passion about in our country.
“We want this game to be the biggest nation-building tool that there ever can be, and by encouraging things like that I think we are fighting a lost cause and even I shouldn’t be here. So I will never, ever be a part of anything like that.”
One does have to take into account that English is not de Villiers’s first language. But on the basic point of whether he believed Burger gouged Fitzgerald, de Villiers clearly did not. “I watched the television footage and I am still convinced there was nothing; he never went on purpose. When he saw the footage it was something that was ‘oh, oh’, but he never meant to go to anybody’s eye.”
Asked whether his belief that Burger is an honourable player would provide the basis for an appeal, an extract from de Villiers’ long response was: “What you must understand here very, very clearly, rugby is a contact sport and so is dancing. So, guys who can’t take it, make the decision.
“There was so much incidents in that game. Say we want to cite this guy for maliciously jumping into a guy’s face with his shoulder and stuff like that? The reason we don’t do stuff like this is (because) this game will always be a game to us and, sometimes, you get away with things you don’t mean. Sometimes you make decisions that are right and wrong, and get away with it, and we are so proud and honoured to be part of it.
“If we are going to win games in boardrooms and in front of television cameras like this, I think we should close shop and say: ‘Do we really respect this game we honour so much and have a passion for it?’
“If there is really a case we are going with now, why don’t we all go to the nearest ballet shop and get some nice tutus, get a great dancing show going on, no eye-gouging, no tackling, no nothing and then we will all enjoy it.
“But, in this game, there will be collision and the guy who won that collision, who is the hardest, that’s the guy I will always select. If you are going to make it soft, if people want a stale series and people don’t like it, I can’t do anything about it.
“What I would love is for people to stand up and take it on the chin and say: ‘Well done South Africa, well done for what you have achieved in this series and well done to everybody out there’, like we did in 1997.
“I always say Nelson Mandela and Frederick de Klerk, they both got the Nobel Peace Prize and whatever they did wrong in their lives, nobody can take away the fact that they won that. So, what-ever went wrong in this Test series, nobody can take away the fact the South Africans are joyous about this Test series.”
Asked if he was disappointed to be portrayed as the Boks’ weakest link, de Villiers said: “If I am the weakest link, we must be bloody strong.”
Sharks lock Johann Muller, who last played for the Boks in 2007, has been called up to the Springbok squad to replace Andries Bekker, who tore a knee cartilage on Saturday. Centre Jean de Villiers and scrumhalf Fourie du Preez have seen a shoulder specialist and been cleared for selection for the third Test.
Danie Rossouw is being monitored and will follow the standard concussion protocol, including neuropsychological assessment, before returning to play.
