Chasing the Sun: It turns out Boks are ‘angry Dutchmen’ for a reason

When New Zealander Tony Brown was asked when he was playing for the Sharks in 2006 what he enjoyed about being part of a South African team he didn’t have to think about it too hard.

“It is great to have the angry Dutchmen in front of you and protecting you rather than have them coming at you as the opposition,” said Brown.

That phrase, ‘angry Dutchmen’, wasn’t meant as an insult. It was meant as a sign of respect for the ferocity with which South Africans throw themselves into the physical aspect of the game. Neither was the former All Black flyhalf saying something that would have surprised his rugby playing countrymen.

When All Black players played together with Springbok players in a Barbarians team sometime around then, one of the things the Kiwi players apparently wanted to know was why the South African players always seemed to be so angry.

We might have suspected we knew the answer to that question but now after the third episode of Chasing the Sun, the story of the Springboks’ phoenix-like rise from the ashes of despair to win last year’s Rugby World Cup in Japan being shown on Sunday night’s on M-Net, we can be more certain.

In order for South African players to perform at their best, they need to make it personal, they need to be angry or they are less likely to achieve success. Certainly that's the way World Cup-winning coach Rassie Erasmus sees it, and he admits now that he actively went out to find reasons why the Boks should have a personal issue with the Japanese in the week building up to the semi-final against the host nation.

“Rassie pre-empts things, he finds things in the opposition to hate, so that he can motivate the players,” said conditioning coach Aled Walters. “How can you hate the Japanese? How can you make it personal? They are such nice people, but somehow Rassie got that right.”

According to Erasmus and defence coach Jacques Nienaber, little things such as the players suddenly having to pay exorbitant amounts of money to have their wives stay with them in the hotels was enough reason to make the Japanese the hated foe for the week that they were filling the role of being the Bok enemy.

“Before that week we could put the lights on at our training venues without their being any problem but then suddenly in that week we weren’t able to do that because we were told that it was near an airfield,” said Nienaber.

Skipper Siya Kolisi concurred with that view.

“Problems that weren’t there before suddenly started cropping up, suddenly once it was known we were playing them in the quarterfinal people weren’t as helpful as they were before,” recalled Kolisi in Episode 3 of Chasing the Sun.

Was it really a case of the Japanese not being as helpful as they were before, or was it that the coach, who has an astute understanding of the South African rugby playing psyche after both playing for the Boks and coaching them, chose to highlight small things and make them into big things. It may well have been the latter.

“Maybe it was paranoia, but the players felt that week that the Japanese were going out of their way to make things difficult for us,” said Erasmus. “We as South Africans have to make it personal. We need to make the gainline personal, we need to make the scrum personal. Otherwise you just want to play rugby against them, and that doesn’t work.

“That’s what changed that week, we love the Japanese but for that week they became the enemy,” he added.

MUTUAL RESPECT

Ironically, Brown was with the Japanese as assistant coach to Jamie Joseph, and after playing in South Africa with the Sharks he may well have understood the psyche that the Boks took on as they approached that quarterfinal. But perhaps there is another man who understands it even better, England coach Eddie Jones, who came up against the Boks in the final.

The former Wallaby mentor loves to goad opposition teams and is a bit of a motor-mouth sometimes in the build-up week to a big game trying to irritate the opposition and get under their skin.

He did it in the build-up to his team’s semifinal against New Zealand. But he was noticeably silent in the week of the World Cup final, with Erasmus noting on the eve of the game that not a single barb had been sent the South African way by the opposition coach.

Erasmus attributed it to mutual respect but was it perhaps something else - Jones served as Bok assistant coach to Jake White when South Africa won the World Cup under the captaincy of John Smit in 2007.

He must after that experience have a good knowledge of what motivates the Boks and South African players generally. Was he keeping quiet intentionally so as not to play into Erasmus’s hands by giving his opponents an extra spur of motivation?

He did spar verbally with the Boks before his first post-2007 game as the opposition coach when the Boks played England at Twickenham in 2016. In a press conference before that game he humorously poked fun at the Boks’ pre-occupation with physicality and size.

That was when Allister Coetzee was coach and perhaps Jones felt he could get away with it then as the Boks were in some disarray. The 2019 Boks were a very different proposition, and as becomes clearly evident when watching the various episodes of Chasing the Sun, the physical aspect was employed with increasingly good effect by the Boks during the course of the World Cup in Japan.

His assistant coach John Mitchell, who knows South Africa well having lived here and coached here, was quoted after the final as saying that he knew his England team might be in trouble when he felt the attitude of the South African players when he tried to greet some of them before the game.

Mitchell’s comments to the media were made post-game but they illustrated and acknowledgement that an angry South African rugby player wearing the green and gold jersey, when that anger is focussed correctly, is something to be feared.

The point being, as Erasmus has admitted, they need that anger and they need to make it personal if they are going to perform their best.