Every time South Africa lose a game of rugby an inquest kicks off back home. When they lose twice in a row it is a major crisis, and when they lose to Scotland for the first time in 33 years it is time for the funeral notices. "Scotland the Grave" was among the gloom-laden headlines at the weekend and, with England to come at Twickenham this Saturday, instant resurrection looks improbable.
The South African newspaper Rapport's postmortem typified the pessimism. "You'd like to say that things can't get any worse, but you used that excuse last week. Is there not a game against Romania on the horizon? Scottish rugby is in a crisis, close to death, but yesterday it was enough against possibly the worst performance by the Green and Gold that these eyes have ever seen."
There is more, much more, but the current Springbok coach Rudolf Straeuli has already heard the gist of it. Yesterday even English journalists were giving him a hard time. "So, Rudi, can Springbok teams still scrummage?" Spitting in his face would have been less of an insult. "We'll wait and see," he muttered eventually, fixing his inquisitor with a stare which required no subtitles.
Unfortunately Straeuli, a decent man still revered by those he coached at Bedford in the late 1990s, is being swept along on a tide of events he can only partially control. More than 20 Springbok players, reacting to the decreasing value of the rand, have gone to play overseas - Andre Vos, Percy Montgomery, Pieter Rossouw among the recent exports - and many of those who have stayed loyal are currently injured.
The likes of Bob Skinstad, Joost van der Westhuizen and Victor Matfield fall into the latter category, leaving behind such a raw squad that the talented No8 Joe van Niekerk, who made his Test debut only last year, is the fifth most experienced player.
Worse still, four props including the highly rated Lawrence Sephaka and experienced Willie Meyer have dropped out of the current tour with injuries, allowing France and even Scotland, a stone a man lighter up front, to expose their callow replacements. To top it all, the upset over Chester Williams's allegations of racist attitudes within Springbok rugby is refusing to die down.
Such circumstances test the mental strength of both coach and players and, so far, the latter have shown little sign of delivering in alien conditions. To underestimate Straeuli's resilience and forget the improvement his backs showed in this year's Tri- Nations, though, would be a mistake and it was impossible to fault his backs-to-the-wall rhetoric at the team hotel in London yesterday.
"We believe there should be pressure on us every time we play a Test match and we accept it," he insisted. "Not just as a squad but as a nation we've been written off before but we've come back strong. I've been hired to win Test matches and win a World Cup for South Africa and if I need to give players experience I'll do that. Every losing Test is a disappointment for South African players or coaches but I've been much lower than this in my life."
As if to prove it, the 39-year-old Straeuli, who trained as a lawyer and won a World Cup winner's medal with the 1995 Springbok squad, having operated the scoreboard at Loftus Versfeld in Pretoria in his youth, is even prepared to lob a few psychological barbs at England.
"Even England have only got a 45% success rate away from home against leading teams in the last three years. They are also a team with weaknesses. If they weren't they wouldn't have lost in Paris this year or away in Dublin in 2001. I always look at things in perspective. They're vulnerable in certain places. I don't think it's an impossible task."
It is also clear that Straeuli is not about to start bemoaning the player drain to Britain - "In the next four to five years English rugby is not going to develop its own players. It's not a problem for South Africa, it's more a problem for England" - let alone cede inevitable defeat in next year's pivotal World Cup pool encounter in Perth. "We know what we've got back home, we know what's still in the bank. Conditions are rather different in Australia in November. That'll be the most important game."
This week, even so, there are some bruised Springbok egos in town.
