Heyneke Meyer may have closed the casket on Morné Steyn’s Springbok career once and for all. But probably not.

Morné Steyn’s goal-kicking arguably cost the Springboks a victory in Dunedin, New Zealand, on Saturday. The Boks suffered a 21-11 defeat to the All Blacks, but had Steyn knocked over his first couple of kicks, the Boks may have had a necessary psychological advantage, as well as the lead, over a mediocre-looking New Zealand side.

Although Steyn missed four out of his five opportunities at goal, Frans Steyn was also guilty of missing a couple. However, the fact that the Boks could have gone into the half time break 18-5 up cannot be ignored, and Morné’s terrible goal-kicking has to foot the blame for it.

Meyer admitted after the game that he had made a mistake by giving Morné one too many chances.

Sitting here afterwards it is easy to make calls but it is a life and death situation for me and maybe I made the wrong call but Morné usually comes back and kicks well. Frans Steyn is a great goal-kicker and Ruan Pienaar can kick as well. You don’t just take a guy off for his goal-kicker.

I’ve always said that I am going to bring Johan Goosen through and give him game time. But Johan had struggled with his goal-kicking in training during the week and he is still only 20-years-old and he hasn’t played for almost three months. I thought he did superbly for the 25 minutes he was on the field.

But we could have changed the goal-kicker. We talked about it at half-time. I thought Morné would find his rhythm.

Captain Jean de Villiers said that at half time they decided to give Morné one more chance. But then he missed his attempted conversion of Bryan Habana’s try in the 49th minute.

Explained the captain:

I don’t think that I am the one to give advice about goal-kicking. We discussed it at half time and we felt that we might want to give Ruan an opportunity but we thought to give Morné one more chance.

He had one when we scored the try and he went off after that. You want to show confidence in your players as well and sometimes you have to make those difficult decisions.

You make mistakes, I make mistakes. Unfortunately he couldn’t kick all of his goals but that doesn’t make him a bad player.

Despite the fact that Morné just isn’t doing the job, he probably remains part of the Meyer plan for now:

I’ve always rated Johan Goosen. I watched him play as a youngster and it is a pity he got injured because he was always part of my plans but I don’t want to throw him to the wolves so last week it was 10 minutes, this week it was 25 minutes.

He is a guy with a lot of character and mental toughness. But Morné has also shown in the past that he has mental toughness so it is great to have two flyhalves like that. It’s great that Johan is coming through.

I will look at the video, take the emotion out of it and maybe make a few hard calls.

What do you think?

[Source: Sport24]