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Is Fourie du Preez the best all-round scrumhalf in the world?According to Joel Stransky, “Fourie du Preez is the best scrumhalf in the world, and arguably the most complete number 9 the world has seen in the past 30 years”. Stransky has earned the right to praise or criticise, as a former Springbok flyhalf whose drop kick in 1995 catapulted the South African team to World Cup Rugby glory.
The SuperSport commentator bases his views of 27-year-old Du Preez upon the player’s ability to master every aspect of scrumhalf play.
“For the past 30 years, we have had great scrumhalfs who had the ability to execute certain things perfectly. Joost (van der Westhuizen), for example, was a great exponent of running rugby. Then you had George Gregan who linked well with the forwards. Johan Roux was excellent at the kicking game.
“But Fourie is unfaltering in every respect. As a decision-maker, he is one of the very best. He seldom makes a poor decision in a season, let alone in a game. And he executes them so well,” Stransky told Leadership.
“His kicking game is superb. And look at the way he ran onto a stray pass from Victor Matfield. He burst into the pass with the acceleration of an outside centre.
“His passing is as good as anyone in the game,” he added.
Is Du Preez arguably South Africa’s best scrumhalf since isolation, better than Joost van der Westhuizen? “He’s certainly the most complete scrumhalf, and possibly the best,” Stransky told Leadership.
Du Preez was the popular winner as South Africa’s Player of the Year last month. Most international commentators endorse him as the best player on the planet.
The 27-year old had a less than perfect game in the Absa Currie Cup semifinal against Western Province. It was as if Province pressurised him, did not allow him any breathing space and focused on slamming him whenever he ventured into open space.
During one of his probing runs, Schalk Burger smashed into him and left Du Preez bewildered and slightly dazed by the violence of the impact.
He promptly knocked-on the ball.
But the Blue Bulls playmaker demonstrated in the Currie Cup final just why he was the best, with three moments of surgical precision.
Those moments gave the Bulls the ascendancy, and the Free State Cheetahs lost their momentum, never to regain it for the rest of the game.
A virtuoso tap kick and a perfectly weighted kick handed a try to Francois Hougaard. Then Du Preez reeled in a stray pass and put a flying Bryan Habana in the clear.
Only minutes later, the Bulls scrumhalf launched a superb tactical kick into no man’s land behind enemy lines, and Habana waltzed over for the third try in 20 minutes.
Game, set and match for the Bulls, as the Cheetahs were aced by one Fourie du Preez.
At the awards evening in Johannesburg in November, Morné Steyn won the prestigious Players’ Player of the Year Award and the Test Player of the Lions Series Award, as well as the Player of the Super 14 Award.
Heinrich Brussouw received the coveted prize as Best Provincial Player of the Lions Tour Award and was also named Young Player of the Year.
But the greatest accolades were reserved for Du Preez, who won the award as SA Player of the Year for the first time in 2006 and who has now reclaimed it in 2009.
Apart from being the chief decision-maker for the Bulls in the finals of the Currie Cup and Super 14, he produced several match-winning performances in the Tri-Nations.
His aerial assaults had New Zealand’s fullback and wings in sixes and sevens in Bloemfontein and Durban.
Against Australia at the Subiaco Oval in Perth, his quick-tap-and-run left the Wallabies bewildered and helpless as he forced his way past four defenders for a try.
Du Preez was then rewarded the Man of the Match award in that, his 50th Test for the Springboks.
In the deciding Tri-Nations match, it was Du Preez who followed up a high kick and then sneaked his body past two All Black defenders with a sniper’s try.
To make it truly memorable, he learned in September that he is going to be a father for the first time. It has excited and frightened him in equal measure.
“It’s a little bit more responsibility than playing in a Test, isn’t it?
“The due date is in mid-April, so fortunately it’s still eight months away. Whatever ideas I have about how I want to approach it, will change every week. It’s the kind of thing you’re never prepared for,” he said to Times Live. (September 2009)
The pending arrival has already affected Du Preez’s thinking about his future: “Next year I will have been at the Bulls for 10 years.
“My contract runs out next year and before I found out about the baby, I was considering going abroad.
“Rugby gives you those opportunities, but I could also decide to study for a degree in the financial world. I’ll keep my options open,” he told Times Live.
Reflecting on people who greatly influenced his life, Du Preez always casts his mind back to his father, Fourie Sr., who represented Northern Transvaal for a decade between 1962 and 1972 as an abrasive eighth man whose bollocking runs terrorised opposition teams.
“He was a massive influence. I grew up with a ball in the hand, but my father never forced me into doing what he wanted me to do. He allowed me to follow my dreams,” he told Leadership.
Talking about people who influenced him, Du Preez speaks highly of the current Springbok coach, Peter de Villiers.
“He has done much to establish a happy team, and has nudged the players in the same direction,” he told Leadership.
“He obviously influences the atmosphere, and he keeps the senior players united. Peter brought the senior players and management together before the first Test in the Tri-Nations so we could discuss and agree on how we were going to play.
“Peter is a man’s man. He does not criticise players in public. He builds relationships with them and would rather criticise somebody by speaking to him individually and constructively,” he added.
Du Preez debuted for the Blue Bulls at age 19, when Anton Leonard and Victor Matfield were senior players.
When asked about opponents who really had an impact on his career, he recalls Australian, George Gregan.
“When we first played in the Super 12, I remember that Derek Hougaard and I played against Gregan and Stephen Larkham. They had featured in more than 100 games as halfbacks. The two of us had played in five or six games.”
Who has been the best player he has encountered in his life? “Victor Matfield. I learned so much from him. He knows the game inside out, and knows what it takes to win and how to be successful.”
Du Preez has kind words for his Bok captain. “John Smit keeps the players together and fills the gap between players and management wonderfully well. He knows what to say at the right moment.”
As a young boy, Du Preez had a few centre spreads against the wall of his room. One of the photos he displayed was that of Van der Westhuizen, who was a childhood icon.
Asked what his advice would be to young players who had similar dreams as him to follow Joost into the Green and Gold and the number-9 jersey, Du Preez said: “Talent and hard work will take you places. But keep you standards high, and don’t surrender your dream. Don’t give up. Ever,” he told Leadership.
Remarkably, that is the most endearing quality of Du Preez. A mere year ago, he had lost his aura of invincibility, and it seemed for just a game or two as if his career were in tatters.
Enrico Januarie had won the game in Hamilton against New Zealand with a remarkable solo run with only minutes remaining. Du Preez spent much time on the physiotherapist’s table with injuries. His run as captain of the Bulls ended in disappointment for the Pretoria-based franchise.
“In a way, it was a great learning experience, something every rugby player goes through. I learnt that whatever you’ve achieved doesn’t count in two weeks’ time, that supporters can turn their backs on you,” Du Preez said.
With these words, he echoed the sentiments expressed many years ago by OJ Simpson, who reminisced: “Fame is a vapour, popularity an accident, riches take wings. Only one thing endures, and that is character.”
His elevation to the Bulls captaincy in 2008 was not the success it was intended to be.
When Matfield’s departure for Toulon allowed him a taste of what captaincy was like, it left him unfulfilled, for things went horribly wrong from the start, as he revealed to Times Live.
“There were a lot of reasons why we didn’t do well. We had a new coach in Frans (Ludeke), we’d lost two senior players in Victor and Gary (Botha), and there were some issues around some of the players who stayed, such as Bakkies’ (Botha) court case.
“There’s a perception out there about our record because we finished 10th. We lost seven games and won six, which wasn’t bad because we were two wins from a semi-
final place.
“Personally, it wasn’t great captaining the side and people claimed I didn’t perform.
“Fortunately, we did well this season, and as far as I’m concerned, I’ve rectified things,” he told Times Live.
The spewing out of the cold, hard facts in his defence goes a long way towards explaining the exacting nature that is responsible for Du Preez’s genius.
One also senses how important it was for him to set the record straight.
“I got a chance this year when Victor was not there for six games (there go those stats again) and it went better.
“I was scared of being captain again when we played against the Blues in the second game of the Super 14, but it went better and we won by a record score against them.”
Judging by how the prospect of captaining again in the future does not come up in the interview, one gets the impression that the painfully shy Du Preez has resigned himself to a leadership role in the teams for which he plays, as opposed to the leadership role (Source: Times Live, 8 September 2009).
But when Du Preez received another opportunity to reassert himself as the incumbent in the number-9 jersey in 2009, he convinced even the fiercest critic not only of his Bok credentials, but of the game-breaking abilities that have since made him the number-one scrumhalf in the world.
Du Preez accepts the compliments, but adds that the critics who laud him now were the same people who questioned his credentials a year ago.
Casting his mind towards the 2011 Rugby World Cup, Du Preez says: “The unity in the squad is important, as well as form and luck with the injuries.
“Rugby is a great and strange game, so the bounce of the ball could definitely cost you a game.
“Momentum at the right moment would be crucial in a Rugby World Cup,” he adds.
Talking about momentum, currently Du Preez is simply the best all-round scrumhalf in the world, and the finest general in rugby/football circles.
He has learned the hard lessons of adversity and triumph, and has accepted both graciously without ever surrendering to defeatist self-pity or vain self-glorification. ?
Fanie Heyns
Je suis une fan des springboks depuis 1995 où j'ai découvert le talentueux Joost Van der Westhuizen!
D'ailleurs, le rugby sud africain n'est presque plus le même depuis qu'il est à la retraite (2003). Son jeu était un atout majeur pour les boks ... mais faut pas oublié les autres joueurs sans qui les springboks n'auraient pas gagnés 2 coupes du monde !!!
Cette équipe a toujours été exceptionnelle !
Bonne route !
Une petite française fan des Springboks