'Racist' axings just rugby decisions

By Andy Colquhoun

My son Conor is three months shy of his second birthday and is at an age I have discovered where every object has only one purpose and every moment only one focus.

For instance, if I sit on the sofa he will hand me (and his mother thinks this is very telling) the television remote control; or if he sees a blank sheet of paper he thinks it's time to practise drawing; and, as he once saw me fiddling around with the petrol filler cap, every time he goes past it he opens it and looks at me expectantly.

e-tv's sports journalists are beginning to remind me of my son Conor. I write that at the same time I admit the cardinal error of not having seen any of their recent output on Springbok rugby.

But as I understand it they have got into a nice vitriolic groove over a couple of recent Bok selections; they were critical of the early replacement of loosehead prop Lawrence Sephaka in Wellington and have picked up the thread following this week's dropping to the bench of scrumhalf Johannes Conradie.

Alert readers may have quickly noticed that the common denominator here is that neither of the players concerned is white.

And that - I understand - is what has exercised the imaginations of e-tv's editors: by implication, if not overtly, they have said that those two decisions were made on racist grounds.

And it is a legitimate question for an observer of rugby to ask themselves less than a decade after 300 years of institutional racism were voted out of institutional existence - although probably not out of universal emotional existence.

But, like my 21-month-old son, e-tv has seen someone sit on the sofa and have handed him the remote control.

They have seen a black player replaced and another one dropped and they have screamed racism.

What they really need to be doing is asking themselves if they are not being racist.

For instance, also dropped this week were Victor Matfield, Faan Rautenbach and Stefan Terblanche.

Matfield had his best game of the year against the Wallabies in Brisbane last time out and - with Bob Skinstad - ensured the South African lineout worked better than it has since 1998.

At the same time Rautenbach played a committed and compelling 80 minutes against the Wallabies and has too felt the keen edge of coach Rudolf Straeuli's axe.

I have not seen e-tv's coverage but I wonder if they have been questioning the racial motivation of those two changes or of the dropping of Terblanche?

And I wonder if Brent Russell were black they'd also be pontificating about his continued exclusion from the starting XV and the fact that he wasn't even in the 22 in Wellington.

In fact, who are the racists here?

But maybe they're right and I've been blinded by the spin-doctoring and the fact that I spend my time on the side of the training field rather than sitting under the hard glare of the studio lights battling to think of something to say to make my programme more interesting.

But then I'm a hopeless optimist who likes to see the best in people and I can't see a racist plot here.

At the same time, cricket's arm-wrestle over quotas continued to bubble just beneath the surface this week and the stated desire of Justin Ontong and Ashwell Prince to be regarded as players rather than as "affirmatives" was repeated.

As far as I can tell that's the fate that has befallen Sephaka and Conradie. Of course, Straeuli knows they are black and in the wider development of SA rugby that gives them a special significance, but first and foremost he appears to regard them the same as Rautenbach and Matfield - they are just rugby players.

I wouldn't have thought of dropping Conradie - but that doesn't make Straeuli a racist in the same way that Harry Viljoen and Nick Mallett weren't being racist when they continued to pick Joost van der Westhuizen at a time when the once peerless halfback - to my mind - was past his best. All three have simply made rugby decisions.

There was a time when e-tv would have been right and I'd have been with them on the barricades, shouting the odds, pointing fingers.

But this time they're wrong and although I hope they remain vigilant, I do wonder when they will, like Conor, grow out of their childish ways. [email protected]