Talking Point

As Heyneke Meyer, the Springboks head coach, was repeatedly asked what the future holds for him after his team’s World Cup semi-final defeat at the hands of New Zealand the impatience of the modern sporting world was once again in evidence.

“Can’t you see how grey I am,” he joked, before adding more seriously: “I’ve just said I’m there to serve.”

That was a reference to a television interview ahead of the press conference and, apparently having anticipated the question it was his mantra for the night. He was to repeat the phrase three more times in the course of the 10 minutes or so in which he faced the world’s rugby media.

While there were unconfirmed reports earlier this year that Meyer was already secure in his job before the tournament got underway his suggestion, when the question came up again, phrased slightly differently, that it was the South African rugby union who needed to answer the question, seemed to indicate that he did not think so and he hinted earlier in the competition that he had come close to summary dismissal following his team’s defeat by Japan in their opening game.

This is a man who has been in the job for just three years and had taken his side from having finished bottom of the Rugby Championship this season and from having suffered what is considered to be the biggest shock in its history, to coming within a kick of the ball of knocking the All Blacks, the reigning champions and world number one side, out of the competition.

It brought to mind a newspaper column I had read on the way to the game in which, immediately before he made his subject’s situation even worse than it had been, Slaven Bilic, West Ham United’s manager, had mused upon whether there was any point in winning the English Premier League if, so soon after having done so, it was true that Jose Mourinho was close to the point of being sacked.

Bilic expressed his admiration for his rival from the other side of London and all that he has achieved over the past decade and made clear his disapproval to the knee jerk response to a run of bad form.

Returning to rugby Meyer, like Mourinho, has made mistakes in recent times with the rights and wrongs of his selection policies and whether or not he has been picking sufficient black players having caused major upheaval ahead of the World Cup, while he has also been heavily criticised for relying too heavily on experience, his team only truly thriving at this tournament when he was forced to do without old warhorses Victor Matfield and Jean de Villiers and give youth its fling.

However three years is a ridiculously short period of time on which to judge a head coach and Meyer had come extraordinarily close to getting his side past the All Blacks and into the final.

And then there’s the matter of the future of Stuart Lancaster who had one more year, admittedly, to get the hosts into shape at a home tournament, failed to get them out of their pool.

A review is underway and Clive Woodward, their World Cup winning manager was scathing at the weekend when critiquing the make-up of the panel assessing England’s performance.

That was all the more interesting on the back of a chat with an English rugby correspondent I bumped into on quarter-final weekend who was bemoaning the task of covering their campaign.

As we discussed whether Lancaster had any chance of surviving he said he was not a head coach and I replied that neither was Woodward, before asking him how many of them had gone back and looked at what they had written when, the then coach having demanded that he be judged on that tournament, his England side had been drubbed by South Africa in the quarter-finals in 1999.

“It’s a fair point,” he said with a smile.

Coaching sport at elite level is generally not, however, a fair environment in which to work.