Morne du Plessis set the tone for a talented and influential sequence of Springbok No 8 when he captained the team and made his mark in the position as arguably the best of his era 50 years ago and he would arguably have featured prominently in Dream Team considerations had he been a player in a more recent time.
There have been many great Bok captains who have played No 8, and since Du Plessis you can think Wynand Claassen, Gary Teichmann and Bob Skinstad, although there were also several others who were leadership figures, such as Duane Vermeulen, while not always being the official captain.
The candidates:
GARY TEICHMANN
Although he was born in Gwelo in Zimbabwe, Gary Teichmann was educated in KZN after his family moved down when he was 11. At Hilton College he was as much a cricketer as he was a rugby player and could easily have excelled at that sport had he chosen that as his focus. His ball skills did come in handy during his playing career, as he was what you could describe as the classic No 8, often providing the link between backs and forwards on attack.
With Andrew Aitken having established himself as the Natal No 8 at a really young age, Teichmann had to wait until the second half of the 1991 season, when Aitken had moved to Western Province, before making his provincial debut - which just happened to be alongside another fine sporting allrounder of that era, the future Proteas cricketer Errol Stewart.
Natal won that game against what was then Northern Transvaal at Loftus and Teichmann’s career never looked back after that, with his try in the Currie Cup final against Transvaal at Ellis Park in 1992 a standout from his first full season of senior rugby and confirming him as a future star.
He was a future leader too although that was something that slowly developed, with many surprised eyebrows being raised when the late Ian McIntosh chose Teichmann as his leader when Wahl Bartmann hung up his boots in early 1995.
But Teichmann erased any doubts by leading Natal to the Currie Cup title that season, and again in 1996, by which time he was also the Springbok captain after the controversial axing of Francois Pienaar.
Teichmann wasn’t helped by the appointment of an inexperienced coach in Carel du Plessis for the 1997 series against the British and Irish Lions, and he and a few other Sharks Boks were thinking about retiring from international rugby before a change of coach was made and Nick Mallett was brought in as the new coach.
Teichmann and Mallett combined to guide the Boks to a record-equalling 17-match unbeaten run (admittedly started in the last match of the Du Plessis reign) and Mallett will be the first to admit now that Teichmann should have led his team to the 1999 Rugby World Cup in Wales. Sadly that was not to be, but Teichmann will be remembered as one of the best No 8s of his career, and also one of South Africa’s most respected captains.
BOB SKINSTAD
Bob Skinstad was effectively the man who Nick Mallett controversially selected as Gary Teichmann’s replacement at No 8 for the Rugby World Cup in 1999, and it remarkable how similar the backgrounds of the two players were. Both were born in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) before heading to KZN, where both were educated at Hilton College.
Any debate over Mallett’s decision to push Skinstad does need to be seen in the context of just how good Skinstad was when he first hit the senior provincial or franchise firmament in South African rugby.
Wonderfully skilled and a player who, like all great sportsman, just seemed to have time and space to do his stuff that others didn’t, Skinstad looked like he’d become a global super-star when he starred for the Western Province team, when just 21, when that union broke a long Currie Cup winning drought in 1997.
He made his Bok debut the following year during what became South Africa’s first Tri-Nations win when he featured off the bench as an impact sub before becoming a starter in the No 7 jersey, with Andre Venter moved to lock, during that season’s November tour to Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England.
The Bok attempt at winning the Grand Slam faltered at the last hurdle when they were beaten by England at Twickenham in the last game of a very successful year, but Skinstad’s best few months as a rugby player were what followed next as he led the Stormers to the top of the Super Rugby log during the memorable 1999 “Men in Black” campaign that is still talked about with great reverence in the region.
For several games in a row Newlands was packed to the rafters as the Stormers, brilliantly led by the sublime Skinstad, beat all comers with a degree of dazzle seldom if ever evidenced in South African rugby in those years.
Sadly though it was after perhaps his team’s biggest triumph, a comprehensive win over the reigning Crusaders in a Sunday afternoon game at Newlands, that Skinstad was involved in the motor accident that injured his knee and forced him out of the rest of the Stormers’ campaign and out of most of that rugby year.
It was a measure of how good Skinstad was that the Stormers just weren’t the same team after that and they were well beaten by the Highlanders in their Newlands semifinal.
Skinstad wasn’t fully fit when he went to the World Cup later that year, it was clear he was still struggling with his knee, and he was never really the same player again once he appeared to have lost his blistering acceleration.
However, he was still good enough to captain his country under later coaches and he had played 42 times for the Boks, ironically the same number as Teichmann, when he played his last game, which was during the 2007 World Cup in France.
Skinstad had been in semi-retirement for a few years before that but was brought back first by Dick Muir to play for the Sharks and then national coach Jake White to bring his influence to the Boks.
PIERRE SPIES
Sometimes you come across a rugby player who is almost too gifted, in the sense that it is hard to pigeon-hole him into a position that is obviously the best one for him. That might have been Pierre Spies, who was a monstrous talent but could conceivably have been as at home at wing, where his late father Pierre played. He was that quick and he was that skilled.
He was occasionally deployed on the wing, as well as on the flank, but it was mostly as a No 8 that he traded. He made waves from a very young age, arguably from his school days at Affies, where he shared a platform with future Bok teammates Fourie du Preez and Wynand Olivier, as well as future national cricket stars AB de Villiers and Faf du Plessis.
It was a natural progression for him then to play for the Bulls, who he first represented at the age of just 20, making his debut against Griquas in a Currie Cup game in 2005, and from there his career took off.
After representing the South African Under-21 side at the 2006 Under 21 Rugby World Championship in France, Spies made his Springbok debut their 49–0 defeat at the hands of Australia in the 2006 Tri Nations Series. He was retained for the home leg of the tournament and turned in two "Man-of-the-Match" performances, in their wins over the New Zealand in Rustenburg and Australia in Johannesburg.
He was injured in the opening match of the end of year tour against Ireland and also missed much of the 2007 Super Rugby season, but was back in the game in time to be part of the first South African team to ever win Super Rugby. He would have travelled with the Boks to the World Cup later that year had it not been for the blood clots found on his lungs that were discovered nine days after he was selected into that RWC squad.
He did play though the following year in Peter de Villiers’ first year as coach and was part of the team that won the 2009 series against the British and Irish Lions and then went on to win that season’s Tri-Nations, during which John Smit’s side whitewashed New Zealand 3-0.
A strong ball carrier and possessed with pace, Spies was a hard man for defences to contain.
JOE VAN NIEKERK
When Harry Viljoen first selected Joe van Niekerk into his national squad not many went along with the selection, for the simple reason that he hadn’t played much if any senior provincial rugby up to that point. However, he had been a star of South Africa Schools, under-19 and under-21 sides, captaining at all three of those levels, and it didn’t take long for the young Van Niekerk to make his mark.
He played initially for the Golden Lions at provincial level and soon made a name for himself as a player very much in the Bob Skinstad mould - he was fast, rangy, had incredible positional sense and great skills. It wasn’t hard to see why Viljoen selected him, although his first game for the Boks, against the All Blacks in Cape Town in July 2001, was hardly the place for him to show his primary assets as the game was played in typical inclement Cape weather conditions.
He started to really come into his own under Rudolf Straeuli’s coaching in his second year of international rugby, 2002, and scored an important try in a great win over Australia at Ellis Park in that year’s Tri-Nations.
Unfortunately for Van Niekerk, who later moved to Cape Town from Johannesburg to play for Western Province and the Stormers, he had some unfortunate injury interruptions in his career. And sometimes he came back into team’s that were so desperate that he was seen as a round peg to fit into a square hole, such as when Jake White selected him as the initial replacement at openside flank when Schalk Burger was injured in 2006. It was not a role he was suited for, certainly not in the way Burger was, but that White turned to him was an indication of how highly he rated him.
Despite the injuries, he did go on to play more than 50 games for his country in a career that spanned the years 2001 to 2010. He left the Stormers in 2007 for the French club Toulon, for whom he became a legendary figure. He played 122 times for Toulon between 2008 and 2013 and will be remembered in the region as one of the most successful of a string of great South Africans who represented that club.
DUANE VERMEULEN
‘Thor’, after the Viking leader, was a most apt nickname for the strongly built rock that was Duane Vermeulen, who as a double World Cup winner will be remembered as perhaps South Africa’s most celebrated No 8.
Born in 1986, Vermeulen started out life in the Lowveld, attending Hoerskool Nelspruit, but it was at the Cheetahs, playing under none other than Rassie Erasmus, who had spotted his talent when he was playing for the Mpumalanga Pumas, that he really started to make his name. He was part of the 2007 Currie Cup winning team but also played well in Super Rugby.
When Erasmus moved to the Stormers at the start of 2008 it seemed only a matter of time before Vemeulen would follow him, which he did the following year. Vermeulen won the Currie Cup twice in his career, the second time being in 2012 with Western Province, by which time he had at last made his debut for the Boks.
We say “at last” because he was often on the fringes of selection before that, and certainly the favourite of many pundits for the role. There was context, however, as Vermeulen had been plagued by injury at key points of the 2011 and 2012 seasons.
Vermeulen, a strong ball carrier, a defender who had the intelligence to become known as “the second best defence coach in the world” when Jacques Nienaber was doing the job at the Stormers, was also a natural leader, although he wasn’t always entrusted with the role officially.
He was the man of the match in the 2019 Rugby World Cup final, and that’s not something anyone could argue against as an achievement. He was already 33 by then and many would have assumed he would retire then, but he didn’t and went on to write another chapter in his fabled career by getting his second feel of the Webb Ellis trophy in France in 2019.
His rugby IP is such that Erasmus chose to get him involved with the Springboks at coaching level and in that role he is still an influential member of the group he served so well as a player.
Apart from his stints with the Pumas, Cheetahs and Western Province, he also played for Toulon, Kubota Spears, Ulster and the Bulls, and in every team he ever played he was recognised as an influential figure and leader.