Six years ago, then Sharks coach John Plumtree waxed lyrical about having to play either Western Province or the Bulls in a Currie Cup playoff match.

“It’s a little like being given an option between cabbage and brussels sprouts,” he said wryly. The place packed up.

I was thinking about this the other day while engaged in another bout of hand-wringing, the new national sport.

Let’s face it, there is no middle ground in local sport; it’s either feast or famine as we navigate painful defeats and warm victories. These days there is more of the former and less of the latter.

Whatever we like to think of ourselves, our approach to sport is seldom scientific or rational. We rant and we rage, we blubber and babble. And that’s just the coaches.

What coaches seldom do, however, is employ humour to good effect. Prevailing wisdom suggests that coaching is a deadly serious business. There is no time for a laugh or a joke.

Peter de Villiers turned that assumption on its head, although he was less quick-witted than merely inarticulate and unintentionally funny. His response to defeat? “We have the right recipe. We’re just using the wrong pots and pans.”

Pure gold.

De Villiers was unique as a personality, truly beyond compare, but what many of the great coaches have in common is a supreme sense of humour. The late Kitch Christie had a tremendous line in dry, deadpan humour. It never produced belly laughs, but it was sharp and cutting and always on the money.

You might not have appreciated Jake White’s straight talking, but he could roll out a line with as much wit and dexterity as Trevor Noah. He was a treat at speaking engagements, often funny and always entertaining.

He, like many others, used humour like a rubber sword. He could puncture any tense situation with a quick quip.

White might have picked up a few tips from his mate, the impish Eddie Jones, who has only ever been a shrewd operator. He famously doesn’t abide lazy journalists and shoots them down with a razor-sharp tongue often laced with sarcasm. To watch him in action is to watch a master at play.

I suspect that a sense of humour is linked to never taking yourself too seriously. In a long-running feud with Michael Cheika, Steve Hansen has often given deadpan, pithy responses that are more eloquent than any long-winded answer could ever be.

Years ago, when he was still New Zealand’s forwards coach, he popped a dig at critics with this memorable line: “Vince Lombardi probably said it first, but Jack Gibson is the guy I remember saying it: ‘They haven’t built any statues for critics or wannabes yet’.”

If you’re on the end of that one, it’s hard to come back.

I enjoyed the homespun philosophy of Jannie du Plessis, who knew full well the value of perspective. “When they say you’re good, you’re not as good as they say – and when they say you’re shit you’re not as shit as they say,” he remarked last year.

The good doctor was often like that, not given to false praise and platitudes.

The point of these little cameos is for comparison with Allister Coetzee, the Bok coach, and Shakes Mashaba, the national soccer coach. In recent weeks they’ve both been stricken by defeats and largely retreated into their shells. Coetzee used to be witty and charming, but increasingly he wears a mask of weariness. Perhaps he feels it would be inappropriate to make light of the difficult run the Springboks have endured. He seems permanently tense, which is understandable given the terrible pasting he’s received from the press and public. I wish he’d take a load off and lighten up.

As so many press conferences have proved, Mashaba is a gibbering wreck. He doesn’t know where to turn and has never been fond of a joke. Pity. It could come in handy.

I remember Heyneke Meyer being the same at the end.

The Springbok job afflicts coaches in the worst possible way. They age, they wilt and they retreat before our eyes, their haunted look betraying the torment inside. The job eats them up. – © Sunday Tribune