Blackballed
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Blackballed
Why Blacks don't cut it in the IRB and why the opportunity exists for the first country that adopts African players en masse to dominate Rugby.
Iron Rugby is a method ideally suited to black teams.
Introduction
I know this may be a bit odd in a Rugby training manual, but you need to take into context the country that I live in and the state of the game in South Africa and the rest of the world. I believe that the Game of Rugby would benefit so much by the mass introduction of Black players.
Its cute that SA Rugby includes 11 blacks in the Springbok squad, but does anyone take them seriously? I have played with and against against Congolese, Jamaicans, Nigerians and a plethora of African Americans that bothered me, but I must say when I look at our lineup of Black Boks, they hardly have me quaking in my boots. If it was not for our transformation policy how many of these guys would get a show in?
Before you get all emotional - lets not take this on our South African chins. The problem of black players in Rugby is not unique to South Africa. Africans are effectively blackballed in most major IRB countries. Let me explain.
I come from a Gridiron Football background. There is one simple Football rule and that is that a white man is rarely a match for a African of equal physical proportions. This is why 70% of NFL players are black, 90% of defensive players are black and I can't remember when last a white man ran the hard yards in a Superbowl.
This was not always so. In the 1960s black players were banned from the US Football leagues. However when they were finally introduced the impact was startling. The game got smaller, faster and harder. Teams that left out black players found themselves with losing seasons. The big rumbling game (a la Springboks or England) was forced to give way to the new impact style.
In the United States 10% of the population is black and 70% of the top Gridiron players are black. Why in the UK, where a similar percentage of the population is black, are there so few black players in top English Rugby? Where are all the Rugby versions of Lennox Lewis, Daly Thompson, Frank Bruno? The only explanation for this is that the policies and coaching directions of the IRB are fundamentally racist.
When I played Gridiron in the UK in the early 1990s, the teams were primarily black and the attitude amongst the players was that Rugby Union was a “toffs” game. They were much happier playing Gridiron Football where things were a lot more fairly played out. Today this emphasis has swung towards Soccer, where black Britons make a major impact on the game. Rugby Union in the UK is poorer for it.
South Africa and England Rugby are the two biggest losers. Both of us have the huge pool of black talent that we ignore. Sure we mean well towards them and we have a patronizing system whereby they are welcome to join as long as they fit in with our white style and our political hierarchy. The Springboks and England should be leading the world with teams that are primarily black, by that I mean like 12 out of 15 players are black.
I live and coach in the Western Cape, where this loss is huge. In the Western Cape, 60% of the club players are black, but they make up a minority of the provincial side. I kid you not. In 2004 I played about 23 games in the townships in and around Cape Town. Of the approximately 20 000 people that I met, less than 10 (ten) of them were white. I never met a selector, scout or senior coaching official from the provincial teams. It was like traveling back 10 years to South Africa under PW Botha.
As I write this, I can hear the mumblings from the back about how our blacks are physically different to African Americans and how there just simply are not any of them interested in Rugby and if they want to play why don't they just come down and play. So how does this work when I say they are “Blackballed”?
The key to being successful with Black athletes is the realization that they are athletically superior and that we have to build our whole team around delivering that talent. It does not help to simply use them in a quota system just filling spaces in a style of play that is crafted for white players. Black players will run faster, for longer and will deliver a harder impact hit per kg when required.
Most of the members of the England Squad, the Springbok Squad and their coaching staff learned Rugby at private schools. In Gridiron, the game they that they learned we call “Option Play”. It is the kind of strategy that you would find at a Mid West High school, where they also also have a dearth of black athletes. In “Option play”, every player who has the ball has a chance to be a General, he can either run pass or kick the ball, but there is no fixed and defined plan for him to follow. The result is the slow bumbling game that is modern Rugby. A player is chosen for his skill in “reading” the game. This “reading” can only be taught over years of schooling at a private school.
This is in direct contrast to a black game like the Run and Shoot in Gridiron, where every player is firing flat out and is playing to a fast defined plan. The result is a much more intense game in which players are pushed to their limits. This is one of the reasons that a top Gridiron player will play only 14 games a year, while a Top Rugby player can play over 30 Games a year.
Rugby is where an 80 minute game consists usually of no more than 25 minutes of actual play and where kicking and wrestling and “grinding” are the dominant factors. This style suits white players. How often in modern Rugby do you see a team come off the field having lost the game but not being “Beaten”.
Black players thrive on conflict. I don't get this from text books or scientific studies, but from years of playing with and against black players. When you look into the abyss and see 120 kg of meat flying straight towards your nose, white men pull back, black men have the presence of mind and the will to push forward. My father used to say “If you want to win a fight against a black man, forget about hitting him in the head” - but then this was purely mythology, we never even allowed blacks onto the field in his day.
Enough whining about how unfair the situation is. Rugby is not about being fair, its about winning. My interest in getting a black team is not to save the world, but simply to win the games. What do we have to do to fix this so that Springbok Rugby in particular can benefit?
1)Change our Gameplan
2)Up the Nutrition of adult black players
3)Change our training methods
Change our Gameplan
We have to change away from a gameplan devised for white players that allows black players a quota side show. We currently use speedy black players for the final part where we “run around” a created overlap. We need to use them to create high speed double team hard contacts.
Later I use more space than this for a full explanation of the Run and Shoot and Impi Defense. In summary we need to move from the Option style play in which every player takes a part in deciding the immediate future of the game, to a planned one in which every player is following a predetermined plan.
Currently we move to a “Breakdown” for the next phase. This is already the wrong thinking. We need to move to the next “contact point”. A preplanned collision in which our players get there faster than them and hit harder when they arrive. So our play becomes a series of small hard hits that wear them down. We are looking to hit our way through rather than run around them. Think of it as a boxers jab combinations followed by a hook.
If we all know where the play is going, then we are able to exert greater pressure - particularly when we have the ball. White style football is far too inclined to kick away the ball. Holding the ball not only takes away their opportunity to score, but worse, takes away the opportunity to hold the ball and hurts them. It is harder to play Defense than to play Offense. By taking the “planned” approach we are able to escalate the contact and play to the advantage of black players, namely the ability to get to the contact point faster and to hit harder when they get there.
The biggest advantage of the planned system is that you don't have to teach players to “read” the game. They only have to learn the system. That is why a player like Christian Okoye, The Nigerian Nightmare, could come out of the Bush in Africa and 6 months later run a 1000 yard season in the NFL, but that kind of progress is impossible for a black player that does not go to a private school to learn Rugby from an early age.
Up the Nutrition of adult black players
It is very noble to have a plan to teach Rugby to kids at school and this does follow on the tradition of “Option play”, one in which we have to create “readers”. But our efforts would be much better spent spending the money on feeding players in their early twenties and looking for immediate returns.
It is a simple fact of economics that black people are poorer than White people. In South Africa this gap is huge. It is a very real cost for an athlete to eat the correct supplements.
One of the biggest gripes I had from Players that I coached in the Cape Flats is that they could not afford new boots. They had been playing for 5 years in the same boots. So telling the guy to spend R 800 per month on whey and other supplements and heading off to gym is like telling them to eat cake. One has to realize what a huge obstacle it is to overcome the problem of poverty. The solution is for us to invest our money in feeding the chosen athletes. I have no interest in starting a soup kitchen, just in pulling out the athletes that we require to be world beaters.
Taking some pencil neck black kid out of the township, because he has lightning speed straight into a crash game leads invariably to what you see in the South African Leagues, injured broken black players.
It takes R 800 000 to pay for a single contracted Super 14 and Springbok player. We are happy year after year to pay these guys to deliver one consistency – they lose. Spend that same amount of money on feeding 100 blacks the correct supplements and sending them through the gym programs, and you will get at least 5 Springbok quality players.
Change our training methods
The Super 14 and Currie Cup and to a lesser extent the Springbok team is littered with black quota players that get led into the slaughter pit, undersized, undertrained, emaciated and soon broken like a stick. Can you think of one black player, besides George Greagan, over the last few years that has come into the high level of the game and truly kicked ass? I don't mean run rings around people, I mean knocked holes through them.
Do you think that those NFL players with the huge thighs, thick necks and tight asses are any different from our black players? They were certainly not born like that. They were made in the long off-season in weight rooms all around America. The really interesting part is that even though they look enormous, on average they are smaller than their white counterparts, but Defenses in the NFL are 90% black, because a ripped black line backer is always worth more that a bigger, slower white one.
What will come out of South African weight rooms will be black players lighter than current White players, but 10 to 15 Kgs heavier than our current undertrained Black Boks. This is achieved by Squats, Bench Cleans and Deadlifts, coupled with a low running schedule and an intensive, expensive diet. Making black players run is a waste of precious gym time. They can already run faster and longer than white men. When we put them into a white training program like we currently do, we are simply setting them up for injury and obscurity.
Black players have natural speed and get running fit really quickly. They need a very different kind of training to white players. It doesn't help dragging a black player naked up some river, what they require is heavy weight training. I was shocked to see Super 14 teams having as little as two weight training sessions a week.
If you have worked closely with black athletes you will know that they respond really positively to weight training. I would like to see black players training 8 times per week in gym. I want to see them training legs so hard that they can't get up off the toilet. The training regime I have in mind is going to make Camp Staaldraad seem like a weekend in the bush.
Do the above three things and you will have a team that will naturally pick itself as black, and best of all - will dominate. If you do this and it fails, I will apologize for pissing all that creatine down the wrong toilet.
