The disturbing part about Italy’s 20-18 win that took the Springboks to rock bottom in Florence on Saturday was that they didn't have the excuse that could've been forwarded when they were shocked by Japan.
This time, there couldn't have been any complacency. Not after the season that the South African national team has experienced.
The Boks started the match against a team who finished stone-last in the Six Nations and never won a game in that competition, with a lot to prove after the previous week’s disappointing effort against England at Twickenham.
What happened at the start of the 2015 World Cup, and the desperate need for a confidence-booster ahead of the final game of the year against Wales, should have ruled out any chance of arrogance.
There was no arrogance. There was no complacency. Instead, there was a team who are desperately short on confidence and who, as has been the case throughout 2016 since Allister Coetzee took charge, were disorganised and looked poorly coached.
The defeat saw the Boks slip to a record of seven defeats in 11 starts under Coetzee, with four wins. None of those wins was convincing either. Regardless of what happens next week in Cardiff, the Boks cannot end with even a 50% pass rate. And that just isn’t good enough.
Coetzee should know that too. There is a lot of talk about poor player cycles and some of the points made in the coach’s defence are valid.
But the players in the team who played on Saturday aren't nearly as bad as they have been made to look this year. Not by a long shot. For goodness sake, this was a year where a South African team contested the Super Rugby final.
Coetzee is a decent human being, but the man in the administration who pushed him most aggressively to replace Heyneke Meyer as coach after last year’s World Cup, Western Province president Thelo Wakefield, should've known that Coetzee has limitations. Why else did he respond to a Stormers crisis a few years back by driving the appointment of Gert Smal above Coetzee as the director of rugby?
That little fact about the Coetzee appointment has always puzzled me. But then how much that is done by the decision-makers in South African rugby does make sense? Former Bok coach Nick Mallett told me long ago - the problem is that the people who appoint the coaches don’t really have the rugby acumen to do so, and therefore are lost when a crisis situation hits.
My own line was always that the Boks should go for the best man for the job - meaning overseas candidates should be considered - and, failing that, Coetzee might be the right appointment if he was given a heavyweight coach to work with him.
When Coetzee worked with Rassie Erasmus at WP and the Stormers, he looked like he was on the right track. When Erasmus resigned, Coetzee looked lost, and was never able to make the necessary adaptations to what had been started by the former Bok loose forward.
It was Erasmus who brought Coetzee into the frame as a potential Bok coach. His plan was that he and Coetzee would do what they did well for the Stormers five or six years ago, with Erasmus providing the rugby brains and the behind-the-scenes strategic and tactical direction while Coetzee provided the man-management and fronted the media.
Sadly for the Boks and their supporters, the partnership never came about because Erasmus got fed up with the way rugby issues appeared to be relegated in the SA Rugby order of importance.
The long delay in the appointment of the Bok coach this year frustrated him. It was why he eventually resigned and signed to coach in Ireland.
There is surely no longer any question of Coetzee continuing in his position after this tour. Even a rousing win over Wales next week shouldn’t be enough to save him, just like a 61-22 win over Australia in the final Tri-Nations Test of 1997 wasn’t enough to save Carel du Plessis.
What made Saturday’s defeat particularly embarrassing for the Boks was that it happened to a team who were selected with the primary focus of winning. Veterans like Bryan Habana have no place in a match against the world’s No 13-ranked team if the objective is to build and grow with the next World Cup in mind.
As was the case when Morne Steyn was selected as the safety net during the Rugby Championship, Coetzee deployed them in an attempt to save his own skin.
Contrast Coetzee’s selection to the All Black selection for their game against Italy. The Kiwis were coming off a defeat but still made 12 changes and selected a young team. They won 68-10 and Steve Hansen was able to say afterwards that players who might otherwise not have had an opportunity had been given a chance and he had learned a lot with next year in mind.
Coetzee isn’t coaching for next year, he’s coaching for today because he’s been in survival mode since his disastrous first Test against Ireland in Cape Town. So he doesn’t even have that to cling to. The Boks have gone nowhere if not backwards in 2016, and enough is enough.
Independent on Sunday