“For it was a game where the Boks conspired against themselves, and there really is no other way to put it.” That was from my supersport.com match report after the narrow defeat the Springboks suffered against Ireland in a Rugby World Cup Pool match in Paris just over eight months ago.
Here’s another quote from my analysis of that frustrating evening from a South African viewpoint that sums up what many would have felt: “It is the big moments that win World Cups, and Ireland won all of those on the night even though they were under considerable pressure for long portions of the game, particularly in the second half.”
It was one of those games. A mate of mine, who doesn’t normally get emotional about these things, left the room where he was watching the game on television when Deon Fourie was skew with a throw at an attacking lineout a few minutes from the end when the Boks were searching for the winning score in a close game eventually won by Ireland by five points.
I had to look all of this up to refresh my memory, for given what has happened in the interim, and the perception that has been developed around the Boks, the game feels so long ago. Indeed, it already felt a sod of a long time had elapsed one month and five nights later when the Boks clinched a successive World Cup title with a one point win over the All Blacks in the final.
To get there, in the knockout phase the Boks had twice dug themselves out of a hole that had seemed likely to engulf them. They’d twice won by a solitary point. Each time they came from behind to do it. So much then for them not being able to play the big moments. So much for any suggestion they might lack BMT. Back home millions of fans were facing borderline cardiac issues, but they remained calm and got the job done.
NARROW WINS SPAWNED A DIFFERENT NARRATIVE
And thus was spawned a very different narrative from the one that was threatening the night they lost to Ireland. The aforementioned Fourie was central to it. There’s been a lot of talk about the Boks being lucky to win the final, particularly from New Zealand, but if we’d been told before the game that Fourie, who had only been recently reintroduced to hooker after years of playing looseforward, would play 78 minutes in that position, we wouldn’t have given them a chance.
Talking of hooker, all the close Bok wins in those nail-biting playoff games were played without the talismanic Malcolm Marx. When we first heard Marx had been ruled out of the tournament, many of us would surely have thought “Well, there’s our chance gone.” For good reason too. Marx is an influential and important player.
And yet the Boks got the job done. They found a way. Far from it being a tournament they won because they were lucky, it was a tournament they won against the odds because of their drive and their never say die attitude. Also because they had created precedent.
When they faced what was a sizeable deficit given the wet conditions with 13 minutes to go in their semifinal against England, they had hope and the supporters might have had hope because of what had happened the week before.
The Boks played the wrong game for the conditions. Had they lost, some might have viewed it as a choke given the disparity between the teams on the world rankings. The reality though is that England played above themselves in a game which, due to the easy draw they’d been given, was their one high pressure big moment of the World Cup.
Had they lost, it would have been said that the Boks played their final against France the week before. It would have been hard to argue.
Some England supporters might feel their team choked in blowing their lead, but that is also not true. England didn’t lose it, the Boks won it. They won it through the scrumming of Ox Nche, the kicking of Handre Pollard, the X-factor moment that produced the try that brought them back into the game and gave them renewed hope.
INDIA BECAME THE CRICKETING VERSION OF BOKS
Just like the Proteas didn’t choke in their first ever appearance in an ICC World Cup final at the weekend. It did look that way if you consider the winning position they’d got themselves into, with 26 needed off the last 24 balls and six wickets in hand. A doddle in modern white ball cricket.
But it wasn’t a case of the Proteas losing the game, it was more a case of India becoming the cricketing version of the Boks in the key moment. Jaspit Bumrah was Ox Nche. It was his sublime bowling spell, and perhaps the bit of gamesmanship from India that saw a halt in play that seemed to go on for an inordinate long time and halted the South African momentum, that turned the game. In short, like the Boks, India found a way.
Yes, there may have been some wickets thrown away with injudicious strokes, or strokes that looked injudicious, but isn’t that T20 cricket? You don’t win in that format if you don’t take risks. With two overs from Bumrah still to come, it was understandable that Heinrich Klaassen wanted to make big inroads into the target in the fourth last over.
What happened in the final was counter to the narrative that had been developing around the Proteas. T20 cricket is not my favourite version of that sport, but I just happened to watch most of the games the Proteas played.
The narrative of the tournament until the final was a similar one to the one that developed around the national rugby team in France. They got to the final because they held their nerve in pressure situations and found a way.
They went into the final with a 100 per cent record and yet Bangladesh were starting to celebrate when a ball appeared to be heading for a winning six in the final over of their group game, only for it to be plucked out of the air in a manner not completely dissimilar to what happened to David Miller in the final.
Harry Brook thought he was on his way to winning what was really a quasi-knockout game against the Proteas in the Super Eights, only for Aiden Markram to pull off a stupendous catch running backwards metres from the boundary rope.
The game against West Indies was in effect a knockout game. It was close. The South Africans held their nerve in difficult conditions, and against the host nation with all their voluble support, and got across the line.
PROTEAS THRIVED ON PRESSURE SITUATIONS
By the time that happened there was a lot of the Boks emerging in the Proteas. They suddenly had the mental strength they didn’t have before. I wondered if the Boks had inspired them.
Players like Tristan Stubbs even spoke up the pressure and how much he enjoyed it. And here was no question of Stubbs spitting the dummy in the final either. His was a nerveless innings, as were most of the innings played in the chase.
What may separate the Boks from the Proteas though, and makes it hard to compare the two, is the weight of history. All cricket lovers will have seen the video of Kumar Sangakara sledging Shaun Pollock when the then Proteas captain came in to bat at a crucial stage of the clutch World Cup game against Sri Lanka at Kingsmead.
Sangakara reminded Pollock about the weight of history he was carrying on his shoulders, and that was 2003. In other words 21 years ago, just 11 years after South Africa’s first appearance in a Cricket World Cup. The narrative was already set all those years ago, so the emotion we have seen after some of the Protea World Cup exits, such as the semifinal in New Zealand in 2015, and again at the weekend, is understandable.
Actually mention of the Kiwis raises an aside - they’ve been so near and yet so far too in several global white ball tournaments, and have played in a couple of finals, and yet have yet to win a limited overs trophy (they did win the Test Championship but that’s not played to the same fanfare).
They lost to England on a boundary count-out in a tied 50 overs final in 2019. Why does no-one call them chokers?
BOKS HAVE HISTORY OF FINDING A WAY
Back to the point though, which is that the Boks have now developed a history in World Cup playoff games that they can draw on in the tense moments. If there is history that weighs on anyone in playoff games involving the Boks, it weighs on the opposition.
The Boks have yet to lose a World Cup final. The first World Cup triumph came courtesy of an extra-time drop-goal. They made the 2019 final by kicking a last gasp penalty in the semifinal. They had three tough playoff games in 2023 they won by a solitary point and in two of them they came from behind.
The Boks are hard to beat in the clutch moments because they have a history of finding a way and that gives them confidence in those moments. And yet when you talk about history it can apply differently to specific events and opponents. The last two games the Boks have played against Ireland - the World Cup game and the one in Dublin before that - they’ve lost because they’ve conspired against themselves and missed out on opportunities.
If that happens again at Loftus on Saturday, a trend will be set, and a narrative that casts Ireland as the Boks’ hoodoo team, and a frontier that can’t be crossed, will be set ahead of the second game in Durban. Such is sport. It, and those of us who are captivated by it, can be cruel. And slave to subjective opinion.
Just ask the Proteas. They came within a few runs of completing their campaign unbeaten and, given how they had to scrap to get to the final, that would have been quite an achievement. They would have got there through their grit.
The events don’t carry the same gravitas, and there are too many World Cups in cricket, but in terms of mental strength it would have been akin to the Boks’ triumph in France. The weight of history would be gone.
Unfortunately for them, they will carry it into at least one more ICC tournament, and defeat in a playoff game will cast them again as chokers, no matter how well the opposition play. Because that’s the easy, lazy analysis. As Markram said after the final, the opposition is allowed to play well. He could have added they are allowed to find a way. As the Boks do. As India did.