Springbok prop, Jannie du Plessis

After the mauling the Springbok scrum received at the hands of the Pumas in two consecutive tests there have been calls from armchair critics for coach Heyneke Meyer to make changes, but in the naming of his 30-man squad for the Australasian leg of the Castle Lager Rugby Championship came confirmation that his hands are tied.

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Marcel Coetzee was one of the players added to the squad, as a backup tighthead, after it was confirmed that Frans Malherbe had sustained an ankle fracture that will rule him out of rugby for the rest of the year.

It is bad luck for the Western Province player, who also had to come home early from last season’s November tour of the United Kingdom, and who sat out a significant part of the Stormers’ Super Rugby campaign.

After starting two tests in the UK last year, Malherbe was emerging as the man to push veteran Jannie du Plessis, who has been part of a scrum that has creaked on quite a few occasions this year. Coenie Oosthuizen, who had spent most of his career as a loosehead, was a long time back-up for Du Plessis and Meyer was trying to push him into a new role, but Oosthuizen buckled once too often and it forced the Bok coach to turn his back on the experiment.

Much though critics would like to see some competition coming through for Du Plessis’ place in the team, it doesn’t look like happening soon, as Van der Merwe is also relatively new to the position, having played much of his rugby at loosehead.

So while there may be howls of protest at Meyer’s persistence with the qualified doctor, the reality is that he is the best the Boks have right now, and his experience will not easily be dispensed with in a position where there isn’t much experience available.

The other options for the squad would have been Du Plessis’ Sharks back-up, Lourens Adriaanse or WP’s Pat Cilliers, both who have been members of the Bok squad in the past.

The front row has to be acknowledged as a massive problem for the Boks, and it is not as if the return of Victor Matfield and the possible return to fitness of Willem Alberts will make much difference to that area of the game.

However, the Boks can console themselves with the knowledge that their next opponents, Australia, are wily and canny in the scrums, playing the referee rather than their opposition, rather than being orientated towards using the scrum as a destructive weapon like the Pumas and some northern hemisphere teams do.

Indeed, the presence of the Australians in the southern hemisphere competitions may be one of the underlying reasons why the Bok scrum has struggled this season.

So far they have played northern hemisphere opponents, who do rely a lot more on scrumming than southern hemisphere teams because of the conditions, and the Pumas, who base much of their rugby culture around that aspect of the game.

In the south, the South African and New Zealand teams have placed less emphasis on using the scrum as a weapon because they’ve been forced to adjust to the success the Australians enjoy in their quest to get the referees to depower the scrum. An example of this was of course the opening Rugby Championship match between the All Blacks and Wallabies.

With teams starting to focus in the south on either forcing or avoiding penalties at the scrums, it is small wonder that when they come up against a side like Argentina, who aim to scrum them off the ball rather than indulge in the subtle tactics that bring the referees into the game, they struggle.

Wales, against whom the Boks also struggled, aren’t the strongest scrumming pack in the northern hemisphere, but the point is they are a northern hemisphere team, and in the north the scrum is a different type of contest to what it is in the south.

The Boks were statistically the most efficient scrum in the world last year, but that was calculated on technical points and penalties, rather than on them destroying opposing scrums. It is a rare thing in the southern hemisphere for the scrum to be used as a weapon of destruction as it was by the Natal teams of the early 1990s when they had Guy Kebble and Wallaby Tom Lawton playing for them, or for that matter by the South American Jaguars team that shocked South Africa by scoring a push-over try against Morne du Plessis’ Boks at the Wanderers in 1980.

The return of Matfield and Alberts and the selection of Van der Merwe for Malherbe are the only changes to the Bok squad that did duty against Argentina. Juan Smith and Warren Whiteley, who apparently impressed Meyer in his short time with the squad, drop out. Smith is however on standby should Alberts not pass a fitness test.

The players will take a few days off before regrouping on Thursday ahead of their flight to Perth, where they play the Wallabies on Saturday the 6 September.