I’ve been talking to rugby people for the past seven weeks and the amount of anti-Peter de Villiers talk is very concerning. What do you want from the man? In the build up to the world cup I think we should put a ban on all “Snor” bashing. Hell, I really like Peter. (People are always surprised when I say that, but I’ve always said it.) I love his honesty and his openness – not always a trait of our national coaches.  He has an opinion and that alone is bloody refreshing. And the players look like they enjoy playing in his side. They look like they trust him as a rugby person, and they should. He’s an honest rugby man. He loves the game. He backs and respects its players. His passion shows. He’s a great selector too and there’s nothing quite as important as selecting the right sides.

Post Jake, ask yourself what sort of guy would have been likely to fit in to a world cup winning team, as their coach. Taking over a team of world cup winners, with World Cup medals and World Cup memories. Whoever was to get appointed to this role could only have done one thing – retain a young winning team, retain its captain and senior players and allow them to manage the set up alongside him. Imagine how you would have felt about Pdivi had he chopped Jake’s stars, appointed his own team and despotically lorded over them?

De Villiers created a self-managed team. His Brains Trust of Smit, Smith, Matfield, Du Preez, (Jean) De Villiers to assist Dick and Gary in plotting game plan and pattern alongside himself. The players were left to manage it as they saw it. How could it have possibly worked any other way? It had to be that way, they were world cup winners. He wasn’t. He retained Jake’s nucleus and injected Brussow, Aplon, De Jong, Hougaard, and Bismark to play alongside them. We thanked him, we applauded him. We loved our results. We won the Tri-Nations, we won a Lions series, we did the triple over the kiwis. Life was wonderful.

The issue with self-managed teams is that they require the stars to align. A bunch of people need to be fit and on form. And this is why they are only sustainable in bursts. Suddenly the leadership group dissipates through injury, positional change, form loss, or weight gain. They lose their mojo. They have a bad year. For the Boks, this was 2010.

So what is the man to do now? Should he change his team five months out? Throw the baby out with the bath water? Change the captain? And what are we to do – the Bok supporters that is. Should we disrespect the coach whose results we loved for two years and when his bad year came along, we accused him of only winning because of his predecessor? (That’s the bitch about sequences; you always come after the guy before you.) If you’re a de Villiers opponent, even you’d have to admit that two thirds of his reign has seen us achieve brilliant results.

I say that the Boks have a huge chance to retain the World Cup. If we name even 25 of the 30 best players in our squad (and he will), we have as good a chance as Australia, as England, as France. So lay off Peter. He did what he had to, he did what we wanted him to. Lads and Ladies, it’s time to support Peter, Dick, Gary and John through thick and thin. It’s a World Cup year for Pete’s sake, and your country needs you. Negative energy is poisonous, get rid of it. Think of it this way – if the Stormers and Bulls contested an all-South African Super Final in 2010, then maybe a bad S15 is what we really need.

What do you think of Peter de Villiers? And what do you think we could do as rugby fans to assist in the Springbok’s World Cup effort?

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