Rugby: Boks in poor shape for World Cup

John Smit has capped a strenuous year on the rugby field by embarking on an exhausting nationwide tour to promote his autobiography. Photo / Getty Images

South Africa won't be at their best for the 2011 Rugby World Cup, the country's leading sports science professor insists.

The over-playing of their top stars this year will lead to a series of serious injuries in 2010 and quite possibly in World Cup year, according to Professor Tim Noakes, head of the Sports Science Institute in Cape Town.

He said leading Springboks such as captain John Smit were "in complete denial" about the damage they had done to their bodies and minds by over-playing this year. The consequences would be severe.

Noakes also claimed that the New Zealanders and Australians were ahead of the South Africans in the way they looked after their top players.

"The Kiwis and Aussies train smarter in my view. We still have the mentality [in the provinces] that you have to stuff up the players at every opportunity and that this is how they will develop the discipline to win.

"All the rest of the world realises that matches are excellent training so that once you start playing matches you need to focus on rest and recovery. The Boks coaching staff knows this and rest the players and train the Boks very little when they are with the national side. But the provinces don't know this.

"South African rugby players do much more running and overall, we spend more time training than the New Zealanders do. And New Zealand are looking after their players a bit better.

"New Zealand are ahead of us and that is why they are much fitter. They don't do the running in training we do. They do high-explosive intensity training but, overall, that is less tiring.

"These guys [the top Springbok players] are the victims of a rush for money. In South Africa, they should be centrally contracted like they are in New Zealand so that they can be monitored.

"The New Zealanders do that sort of thing, how many times the players are in contact situations, etc. That is why they survive longer. I am convinced that no matter who you are, you only have so many contacts in you during a career. Once your body has reached that number, you are effectively finished."

Noakes said before the Springboks' disastrous end-of-season Northern Hemisphere tour in November (in which they lost four of their five matches) that 13 of the top players should not have toured due to fatigue.

"My major point remains that the consequences of the tour will be felt in 2010 and 2011. "Furthermore, what happened on the tour had been predicted by myself and the Springbok fitness trainer (among many others at the institute involved in monitoring the players).

"The evidence related not so much to the certainty that the majority of those Springboks would play poorly on the tour - that was sufficiently predictable that it required no intelligent debate - but rather to the long-term consequences of this ill-considered decision."

The immediate consequence of this over-exposure would be that the Springboks would not be as dominant in the 2010 Tri-Nations. Noakes added that the task of winning the World Cup had now been made harder.

As for Springbok captain Smit, Noakes was scathing.

"It seems clear that John Smit is in complete denial about the state of his own body and its needs. He is like a lot of the top Springboks - he needs an eight-week rest in which he should not see a rugby ball or do anything."

Smit, he says, urgently needs to put his feet up, stay at home with his family and take complete relaxation after an 11-month season. Instead, he is undertaking a 10-day whistle-stop national tour to promote his autobiography.

"He has lost the plot completely ... Anything like this which leaves you open to public exposure means your system gets hyped up and you can't sustain that for a long time," Noakes said. "I'll tell you the price he will pay. He'll have a bad 2010 rugby-wise because eventually his system will collapse, mentally and physically.

"He should be away from the public eye doing nothing. He needs an absolute emotional break from everything. He must not think about rugby for at least two months."

Noakes revealed that Smit accumulated a total of 2081 minutes of match play this year. Yet hooker Bismarck du Plessis racked up 2422.

"In the past seven seasons, Bakkies Botha has not been able to stay injury-free the following season if he played more than 1350 minutes in the previous season. Prior to the European tour he had already accumulated 1454 minutes. Thus his back injury on the European tour was a predictable 'accident' waiting to happen."

- Peter Bills is a rugby writer for Independent News & Media