Big Sam Allardyce is gone and Allister Coetzee’s in trouble. Louis van Gaal didn’t last long and Russell Domingo will be on shaky ground should the Proteas go down to Australia over the next few weeks, as they might well do.
That’s the life of a professional coach at the top level of sport.
School coaches are different and they don’t owe their jobs to the success of their teams. Or so I thought!
This week has seen the announcement of the directors of rugby (that’s a term you never heard in the old days) at schools in Joburg, and I spoke to the people at a top school in another town last weekend, and they tell me they can’t announce their new man yet - because their 1st choice candidate turned them down.
The package offered wasn’t good enough, I suspect. And that’s another word you never heard before. Coaches used to get a teacher’s salary, and maybe something on the side for the extra hours he put in. Packages were for business executives, or delivered by the Post Office - that also doesn’t happen anymore!
There are some big names coaching 1st rugby teams at the top-ranked schools in the land and I shudder to think what the packages were that lured them away from jobs with higher level teams.
The upshot is that the game at school level is much better coached and the gap between the teams that are professionally prepared and the rest is getting bigger all the time.
I’ve been accused of being disingenuous by someone I really admire because I’ve confessed to being delighted with the rugby produced by schoolboy teams while, at the same time, declaring that the professionalisation of the game at school level is a bad thing.
He has a point, I guess, although I did explain that good coaching cannot be faulted if it makes players physically more capable of playing the game because it reduces the risk of injury. And it is possible, surely, to admire this particular aspect of the beautiful game and still take an ethical, educational stand.
I’ve read a lot about the great ‘philosopher coaches’ and there’s no doubt the best of them did both - they were technical masters, but they were also good people who established relationships with players and were concerned with developing good human beings.
I’m sure many of the new breed of well-paid professionals put in charge of 1st rugby teams at schools do that - they have sound educational values and are able to use rugby as a tool to teach young men to properly take their place in the world when they enter it.
Leadership is, however, about example as much as anything else, and impressionable teenagers will often take on the values they are exposed to by those put in charge of them.
And theres the danger, when big money becomes part of the equation, the values change. Educational institutions are forking out the kind of money (if rumours are true) that can never be covered out of school fees collected.
So there are other sources of cash, and those who provide it are, I’m pretty sure, less concerned about the quality of men sent out into the world after matric than they are about the number of wins the team produces, and their position on the rankings, this season.
And the coaches, knowing that if they don’t produce the goods they will be going the way Van Gaal went, and that Coetzee will probably be going if the Springboks don’t come right, will inevitably base their values on winning.
Educational values have to take a back-seat and, while the standard of rugby improves, can we really say we are teaching young men the right things?
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