THE HERALD REPORTS

Surely scrum mistake
ALASDAIR REID June 23 2009

EUAN MURRAY: Is this the man who could have tamed the beast?
Peter de Villiers, the South Africa coach, believes the British and Irish Lions made a serious blunder by effectively ruling Scotland prop Euan Murray out of the running for a place in last Saturday's first Test against the Springboks in Durban, where the tourists were humiliated by the power of their opponents' scrum.

De Villiers said yesterday that Murray was the only Lions prop they feared, and that knowing he would not be involved in Saturday's match provided a psychological boost for the hosts.

Murray's selection for the midweek match against the Southern Kings a few days earlier was a clear signal that he would not be chosen to face the Springboks. As it happened, the Scot suffered a tour-ending ankle injury in the Southern Kings game, while the tighthead berth in the Test side was given to England's Phil Vickery.

Vickery had a nightmare match, humiliated in the set-piece by Tendai Beast' Mtawarira. However, seven months ago Murray had easily got the better of Mtawarira when Scotland lost narrowly to the Springboks at Murrayfield.

"Murray is the only one who gave us trouble last year on our tour of the UK," said De Villiers. "We were s*** scared of him. When we saw he was playing in the Tuesday game there was a lot of relief in the camp, and the relief is still there because due to his injury he has now moved on."

Since Saturday's match, De Villiers has been heavily criticised for a substitution policy that caused the Springboks to let slip a 26-7 lead before finally holding on for a five-point win after the Lions took advantage of their disruption in the final quarter. Having initially admitted he might have erred, De Villiers rounded on his critics yesterday.

"We didn't put on schoolboys as replacements, we put on Springboks,"

he said. "In retrospect, maybe I should have sent one or two of them out earlier to get them on the front foot. But the one thing I can tell you is that we won the game."

The first non-white to coach the Springboks, De Villiers also suggested that criticism directed at black scrum-half Ricky Januarie was evidence of lingering racism in South African rugby.

"Ricky made one blunder, but so did a few other players too," said the coach. "What I've learned in South Africa is that if you take your car to a garage where the owner is a black man and he messes up then you'll never go back to that garage again. If the owner's a white man you say, ah, he made a mistake, and you go back."

This article was posted on 23-Jun-2009, 07:04 by Hugh Barrow.