STRIKING IT RICH: Stormers fell where Mean Machine also faltered

HUNGRY FOR SPORT IN “THE BAY”

“How do the Stormers feel about playing such a big game in Gqeberha?” It was because I didn’t know the answer to that question, asked by a journalist colleague enjoying Sun City and the Nedbank Golf Challenge, that I am there.

‘There’ in that case being a self catering apartment in Summerstrand, on the Gqeberha beachfront, from which I ventured to Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium on Saturday night to cover teh Stormers game against Toulon in the Investec Champions Cup.

Now just in case you happened to go into my similarly titled travel diary/column currently posted under Friday on supersport.com, note that the tenses have been changed here. I was in such a rush to fulfil my other mission to Gqeberha on Friday morning that somehow I forgot to press the send button. Which was why the diary, as it was then, appeared five days later on this website. You can still find that initial contribution if you know how to search for it.

The other mission was to watch the second cricket test between the Proteas and Sri Lanka at St George’s Park. It wasn’t my motivation for driving the N2, the rugby was, but when I realised the cricket was over the same weekend, I drove up a few days earlier. I arrived on Thursday via a good night at a backpackers in Wilderness, and got in three days at the cricket - Friday, Saturday until tea time when I had to go to the rugby and Sunday.

Anyway, before we go into digression way too early in this piece, let’s record that I did get my answer to the question - if the Stormers are unhappy playing in Gqeberha, there’s something seriously wrong with all of them. There were 27 000 at the game, which is a lot of people if you consider the Eastern Cape is not supposed to be the region the Stormers represent.

So the answer to another question is easily forthcoming - is the Eastern Cape rugby starved and would there be an eager market if top rugby was available more regularly? Absolutely it is and absolutely it would be.

That the Stormers would be getting some support was obvious at the sparsely populated St George’s Park on the third morning of that game. There were plenty of Stormers shirts around. And thousands of them at the stadium. To me it felt no different being at the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium than being at the Stormers’ more regular home base of DHL Stadium. The noise at Nelson Mandela might have been even louder, and the support even more passionate.

A RUGBY PLAYER MINE

That there’s a big appetite for rugby in Gqeberha is not news to me. Even discounting the many Currie Cup games I watched at the old Boet (Boet Erasmus) when studying in Grahamstown in the 1980s, there is more recent evidence to suggest there’s a massive hunger for rugby in the region.

There have been a few test matches in recent times that have showcased that appetite for rugby, but otherwise there’s been very little in the way of big games. And yet, during the Southern Kings’ fairly decent last year in Super Rugby, 2017, I was at the stadium the day they hosted, and beat the Sharks. The 40,000-capacity venue was nearly full. According to local journalists, it was more than full, bursting at the seams, a few years before that when Eastern Province played a First Division Currie Cup final against the Mpumalanga Pumas.

That a region so hungry for rugby and which produces so many top players, particularly black players, does not have a team to support is a tragedy. There are so many players who do make it out of this fertile breeding ground for young rugby players, but they have to head to KZN or the Western Cape to make it.

So it wasn’t just about wanting to see if the Stormers coaches and players were lying through their teeth when they say they enjoy Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium as if it’s their home patch in Greenpoint, which is probably just over 800 kilometres from there regardless of whether you are flying like a crow or travelling along the N2 in a Navara bakkie.

It was also about wanting to see how rugby is going in a very fertile yet horribly and tragically neglected breeding ground for the sport in this country. Call out their names - Kolisi, Mapimpi, Am, Fassi etc etc - and they come from here (well Border is the same region in my eyes). But there’s no team representing the region that future players of that ilk can support and aspire to play for.

Which if you were to ask me is ridiculous. That this region, which starts just south of Tsitsikamma and ends at the Mtamvuna Bridge near Port Edward on the KZN South Coast, and extends inland towards Aliwal North (Frans Steyn and Johan Goosen are from that area) if you are traveling the N6 from East London, is like a gold mine. Only for rugby players, not gold, so it’s like a rugby player mine.

UNTAPPED GEMS GO UNDISCOVERED


There are apparently so many untapped gems that go undiscovered, which I was informed of over a lunch I had with former Bok World Cup-winning prop Garry Pagel (1995 edition) at the famous old Pig and Whistle Pub in Bathurst (I think it’s the oldest such establishment in this country) a few years ago.

Garry had been helping out with coaching in one of the far-flung areas of rural Eastern Cape and he said the talent he saw made his eyes bulge out of his head. Only no one seemed to care about it and the players weren’t offered the encouragement they needed. He became disillusioned.

It must be disillusioning to the genuine rugby people of the Eastern Cape that there is no local team to support and that the players who want to make it have to move to Durban or Cape Town. How much better and more settled might they be if they could just stay put, near their families? Those who can hack moving are probably the ones that make it. Those who can’t, don’t.

Back in the day, and I really mean back in the day, there were unions much closer to home for people of the rural Eastern Cape. Another former Bok prop, from a similar vintage to Pagel, who hailed from rural Eastern Cape (Molteno) was Keith Andrews. One of Keith’s first rugby memories was watching North Eastern Cape playing the All Blacks in, if my memory is correct, Burgersdorp (right next to Aliwal North).

OUTREACH OPPORTUNITY

Okay, we have televisions now, but how much more inspiring must it be for youngsters to go and watch their heroes in the flesh? You don’t have to remind me about the mismanagement that has stymied both Border and Eastern Province in the past, but that’s not the fault of the passionate rugby people who live in Gqeberha.

There used to be strong structures in place in this region on both sides of the old divide that unfortunately plagued not just rugby but every walk of life in the apartheid era.

If too much politicking, and I was told by local journalists that it still continues, is not going to deliver rugby to the Eastern Cape, why not let the Stormers take advantage of the situation by turning EP supporters into Stormers supporters by playing there more regularly?

Due to their home base being leased from the City of Cape Town, there are on average three home games a season that the Stormers have to play away from the DHL Stadium. Their more used alternative venue is Danie Craven in Stellenbosch, but that doesn’t seat enough people to offer the big occasion atmosphere Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium does. So play those three games a year, plus pre-season friendlies, in Gqeberha.

CHAMPIONS CUP IS AN EXCUSE TO TRAVEL

It was a pity I did not stick to my initial plan, which was to do the drive from Cape Town on the Friday in that sense that had that been the case, I’d have been able to suss out how many people were undertaking the trip from Cape Town for this game.

One of the reasons the people in Europe aren’t crazy about South African teams being in the Champions Cup, apart from the fact that no map shows South Africa to be part of Europe, is because, for many club supporters over there, the competition is seen as an excuse to travel.

Speak to the South African players who have played Champions Cup for overseas clubs and they will tell you about how, particularly in France, the towns would be invaded on the day of the game by supporters of the opposition team. How trains would be brimful of travelling fans. The stories told all make it sound so special, and there are some fans who try to get to every single game their team plays in the competition.

It is understandable that those same people might baulk at having a train trip or road trip removed as an option. Well, you could probably drive between France and South Africa, but they tell me it's a long way. And time-consuming. I wouldn’t even attempt it on a luxury bus. In fact particularly not on one of those after my experience returning to Cape Town from the All Black test in Johannesburg in August.

WHERE RICEY’S TEAM TRIPPED UP

There I go - I used a capital ’T’ for test in that last paragraph. It is usually a test that gets me on the road, not just a franchise or club game. So back to cricket.

Let me confess that cricket is probably my favourite sport. Possibly because, as the late doyen of SA cricket commentators, Charles Fortune, might have put it, at heart I am no hooligan. It was Charles who, in one of his radio commentaries when I was at a very impressionable age, ended a stint in a cricket game at the Wanderers by saying “We are going to have to end this now because they want to cross to a game at Loftus, where some hooligans are playing”.

For me, the ultimate form of the ultimate sport is test cricket. In fact, the shorter version of any sport is anathema to me, which is why I did not just stay in my home city last weekend to watch the Sevens. That’s just an excuse to drink beer. Who needs an excuse for that?

My first visit to St George’s Park was during my university years and it was also my first exposure to the longest format of the sport. It was 1989. The old Transvaal ‘Mean Machine’, captained by Clive Rice, travelled to Port Elizabeth for a Currie Cup final against Eastern Province. The Currie Cup was played over three days in those days, but when the final was introduced that game, for the obvious reason that a draw should be avoided, was extended to four days and later five.

A friend who lived on a farm in Addo and I came to every day of that final, which was a seismic event on the sporting calendar at that time. EP batted first, and the late Phillip Am made 214 and Ken McEwan made 191.

KEPLER WAS UP WITH THE TIMES

From memory, and I hope I don’t have this wrong, a very young Clive Eksteen dropped one or both of those batsmen when they had very little. EP went on to make over 500, with Vlam Michau striking a rapid and belligerent 79 towards the close of the second day. Kepler Wessels was the EP captain, and was criticised for not declaring. EP batted for half the game.

But the reason Kepler was criticised was because in this country we didn’t have any understanding of the test format. Kepler, having played for Australia, did. By batting as long as he did, and his team making as much as they did, Transvaal, who for so long had dominated SA domestic cricket, were batted out of the game. And sure enough, they were so demoralised when they eventually went out to bat that the likes of Henry Fotheringham were unable to make their usual impression. EP won by a mile and even though I was a Natal supporter, and my mate from Addo was Western Province, it was an unforgettable weekend.

REMEMBERING THE HEROES - OR NOT

What I quite like about St George’s Park - actually there are many reasons I like it, as it is a great venue to watch cricket - in its current guise is that the cricket administrators have made an effort to remember and commemorate the heroes of the past. There’s the obvious one - Graeme Pollock has a stand named after him. And if you walk the concourse beneath the stands there are pics of the legendary “little dog”, as he was known in his playing days when “big dog” Peter, his brother was a teammate, there are photos of the great left hander flaying hapless bowlers who would have prayed to God to help them out but couldn’t because they thought He might be the guy batting!

There are also photos of that legendary groundbreaking EP Currie Cup team, several photos of the Eastern Cape teams that were successful in the old Cricket Board days, plus quite a few newspaper articles from the early 1970s, when the tours by what were then known as the Springboks were cancelled by first England and then Australia. That was the start of our cricketing isolation, and having those old articles up on the walls will have provided so much context for those who needed it and are visiting St Georges Park and watching a cricket match for the first time.

On this subject, it has always struck me as ironic in a rather tragic way that the national cricketers from the apartheid years don’t get recognised by their national body and yet in rugby the opposite is the case. The Springboks of yesteryear are feted at SA Rugby functions while, and this in particular bugs me, Barry Richards, unlike Pollock at St George’s, has absolutely nothing of any significance named after him at Kingsmead. Or at least there wasn’t anything last time I was there.

Barry in his pomp was the greatest batsman this world has seen - well, I didn’t see Bradman obviously - and even against the very quickest of bowlers, it looked sometimes like he had a year to make up his mind what shot to play.

Why it irks me is that the cricketers were so much more proactive in their opposition to apartheid than the rugby players were. Yes, there were liberal Springbok rugby players, Tommy Bedford springs to mind and Morne du Plessis was a proper statesman and I’d definitely vote for him to be President of the USA, but the rugby players never did what the cricketers did in 1971, when just after the start of a game at Newlands they walked off the field in a protest action to show their support for multiracial cricket in South Africa and their dissatisfaction with the status quo.

It was a highly incendiary thing to do at that time and the quote that will be remembered was the one from the irritated then Prime Minister BJ Vorster, who was confronted by journalists after completing a round of golf in Durban. When asked for a reaction he gruffly said “I will worry about those bleery cricketers later”. Or something to that effect.

PROTEAS ON A GOOD WICKET

Okay, now that little personal vent, note the word personal, is out of the way, let’s move onto the cricket test that was played at St George’s. And some blatant and uncomfortable honesty needs to be got out the way too - the machinations that put the Proteas currently at No 1 in tests make even less sense to me than the World Rugby rankings do.

But having a World Championship for tests does make a lot of sense. It brought an extra edge to the Sri Lanka series that there wouldn’t normally be for the cricketing public in a series against those opponents - and it will also be the case for the forthcoming Pakistan series (I will watch all five days of the Newlands test if the game goes that long).

Having acknowledged that I don’t see the Proteas as a top two team at test level, if there is a sporting event scheduled for next year that I would like to be at it would be the Lord’s final, which SA will almost certainly be involved in. And given the improvements made to the batting, and the balance to the team when they have a batting allrounder in Wiaan Mulder fit, there is no reason they can’t win that final.

Mention of Mulder does introduce the one selection dilemma heading towards the Pakistan series. The Proteas do seem a bowler short at times, and Mulder brings the necessary balance, so who do you drop from the batsmen? You’d assume it would have to be a middle order batter that would make way, and they all look in pretty good nick. David Bedingham hasn’t contributed for a while but he nonetheless clearly looks a quality player so would be difficult to drop.

It’s a nice dilemma to have. On the subject of Bedingham, one of the reasons a trip to the ground when the test is in your town should be highly recommended is the full view you get of the field.

I am not sure it was picked up on television, but the field setting that telegraphed the Sri Lankan short ball intentions to Bedingham in the second innings set up an absorbing focus. He handled it pretty well in the end and went out eventually to one that turned quite prodigiously from the spinner.

WOW - JUST WOW!

I have already said that to me test cricket is the ultimate form of the ultimate sport, so it hardly needs pointing out that I see T20 cricket in the same way as I regard chewing gum - in other words, it tastes really nice when you first bite into it, but after a while, it loses all taste and you have to spit it out.

But while there are many, and this includes even those who love the shortest form, who question the logic of having bilateral international T20 series (there are World Cups every two years), the under-strength nature of the games does offer development opportunities. And suddenly South Africa has young talent coming through in numbers.
During the lunch break of the fourth day of the St George’s test, I ventured out onto the field at lunchtime to look at the pitch. And on the side of the pitch, there was a young bowler working out with the Proteas bowling coach Piet Botha. He was impressive enough to detract my attention from the patches of dust that were starting to appear at the one end of the pitch that made it look like it might in time become the Kalahari.

The young bowler was the left-arm quick Kwena Maphaka, who paraded his stuff on my television set two nights later in the T20 international in Durban. He’s 18 years old, he clocked 152km an hour with one of his deliveries. He also has a measured run up so may not be one of those quicks who ends up spending half his career being rehabilitated from injuries. Just wow. That’s all I will say. WOW! It’s in test cricket that quicks are most needed, so I just hope we play enough tests. If you want me to go on another rant it is that Kagiso Rabada has just over 300 wickets when at this point of his career, had he played more of the longer format, he’d probably hold the SA record by now and be well over 450.

WHAT IS IT WITH THESE ROAD SIGNS

So I am always careful to refer to Gqeberha as Gqeberha and not as its old name of Port Elizabeth. I imagine that is what the City Fathers would prefer. Yet when driving there from Cape Town there was no mention of Gqeberha on any road signpost on the N2. Driving into the city it was almost tempting to stop at the side of the road to ask someone “Where is Gqeberha, I only see signs for Port Elizabeth?”

And if you are driving in from the Cape Town side and intend to carry on on the N2 towards Durban and the old Transkei, be warned that you shouldn’t look for any sign directing you to Makana, the new name for Grahamstown. It’s still Grahamstown. The aforementioned Charles Fortune, who was a schoolmaster in Grahamstown for many years, would be confused, not least because in his commentaries he used to insist on calling EP players who had been schooled in that city (it is a city because it has a cathedral), such as Rupert Hanley and Rob Armitage, as having been “schooled down in Albany”… Which, I think, is or was the magisterial district.