As the man where the buck stops, Nick Mallett had to face up to much criticism this week, but he might console himself with the thought that at least everyone knows now why Western Province needed to appoint a director of rugby.

There was a lot of spin coming out of WP headquarters in the wake of the poor performance in the semi-final against the Cheetahs.

We heard, among other things, that WP are in the process of rebuilding, we also heard that the young team was made up of players who were in their first season of Currie Cup rugby. Like all spin, you had to sift a bit to separate what was fact and what was wishful thinking.

For instance, this province that is supposedly rebuilding does employ more first-choice Springboks of the past two seasons than any other. And the Stormers did last year make the Super 12 semi-finals.

Several of those young players supposedly in their first season of Currie Cup rugby were in fact in their second. Earl Rose played under previous coach Carel du Plessis, so did JD Moller, and so did Ross Skeate and Andries Bekker.

Coach Kobus van der Merwe said immediately after last week's defeat that the big positive from this season was that a smattering of these young players had experienced Currie Cup rugby and would learn from the experience.

So it did not help when on Tuesday we discovered that one of the most gifted of those players is actually going to apply that experience at the Lions. But if you look at the facts of the Rose defection, Mallett and his helpers cannot be blamed.

And once you dig deeper into the real malaise holding WP back, you also find that it becomes hard to blame Mallett. The reality is that WP rugby has been sick for a long time, and just as it is now clear that you cannot lay all the blame for what happened to the Stormers on Gert Smal and Carel du Plessis, so it would be wrong to blame the new regime for what they have inherited.

It certainly seems a long time now since the 2001 final, in which Province won their second successive title by beating the Sharks.

A few days after the game, Rob Wagner, the WP managing director, hosted a lunch for Cape rugby journalists. At it, Wagner confidently predicted that his union was about to become the Manchester United of rugby.

He must wish now that he had never said that. Manchester United, like WP, have a huge wage bill, they employ a lot of stars. But like WP, they too appear to have got the basics wrong.

The problem for WP is the tight five. Mallett contends that the young players now coming through at WP are better than the young players elsewhere, and that outside of the Bulls, no other province really possesses players with more promise.

But Mallett did add a rejoinder to his appeal for patience that might have been chilling to those who have WP rugby's fortunes close to their heart: "Ultimately," he said, "we have no choice."

Which begs the question, how did WP get into this situation? This takes us back to Wagner. A few seasons back, when WP had just contracted Joe van Niekerk from the Lions, Wagner was asked by journalists why his union had decided to buy a loose-forward when there was an obvious need for grinders at forward.

Heyneke Meyer was already proving that this was the type of player required to win Currie Cup titles. WP had lost most of those who had helped them to two successive Currie Cup titles at the start of the millennium to overseas clubs, but Wagner told us he was unconcerned about the tight forwards.

Which may explain why before Mallett arrived, most of WP's high profile signings tended to be in areas where they were already well served, such as loose-forward (Van Niekerk and Luke Watson).

Wagner argued then that you did not just contract players to win you matches, you also contracted players who would put bums on seats. But last week's semi-final was a painful reminder to the WP bosses that bums only land on seats when teams are winning.

With just 35 000 pitching for the most important game of the season, clearly the Stormers defeats in the Super 12 have not been forgotten, and neither is WP's also-ran status behind the rampant Blue Bulls.

Players such as Van Niekerk cannot perform to their best when behind a pack that is getting shifted backwards every week, and neither can all those fancy backline players who look so much better every time they pull on the Springbok jersey.

One person who did recognise this was Smal, which is why it is hard to heap all the blame on previous coaches. Smal often spoke about players he wanted, normally tight forwards, but which he for various reasons could not get through the Province administration.

Smal wanted to secure the services of an overseas lock for the last Super 12 season, a signing which could have made a dramatic difference to the Stormers' season, but had to tread like a butterfly around the subject because of "certain sensitivities".

The Bulls, by contrast, just contracted up every decent tight forward that Meyer laid his eyes on, to the extent that props and locks now make up a massive proportion of the Blue Bulls' contracted group of 91 players (WP have 51 players on their books).

WP, over the past four seasons, have at times boasted a surfeit of talented players in some positions, such as two Springbok fullbacks, three Springbok centres and two Springbok scrumhalves.

In that time, they have not won a trophy, and yet their wage-bill for just the scrumhalves alone came to R2.8 million, which is over half of the entire budget of today's Currie Cup finalists, the Cheetahs.

Mallett is right in saying that the Bulls have contracted most of the good players in positions where WP most need it. But four years ago that was not the case.

WP are now learning the meaning of that old saying "you snooze, you lose", and with failure in the semi-final last weekend, the province was reminded why they needed a director of rugby.

• This article was originally published on page 34 of Cape Argus on October 22, 2005