Why England needn’t have got out of bed on 2 November 2019

The final episode of Chasing the Sun was aired on M-Net on Sunday night, the eve of Monday’s one-year anniversary of the 2019 Rugby World Cup final, and if any England players or coaching staff watched it, what would have struck them is that they really never stood a chance of winning.

What shone through in the emotional final episode was something that was there in the previous four but was even more evident at the culmination.

For the Springboks, once they get to a World Cup decider, it becomes far more than just a rugby game, something much bigger than a sporting event. And the emotion that is driven by the nationalism that inspires the Boks may be impossible for another nation to even try and replicate.

Most top rugby players will talk about playing for the jersey. That is an ethos that is instilled in them from an early age. They play for the school jersey, then they play for the school first team jersey, which they aspire to through all their school years, and then it is the province or club jersey. And so on and so on.

England would have gone into last year’s final in Yokohama, exactly 12 months ago if you are reading this on Monday, deifying their white jersey and the badge, pledging their allegiance to the flag. If there was an “outside of rugby” element, they’d have been playing for the Queen, as their national anthem exhorts them to do.

DEFENDING THE COUNTRY

How though can that be compared to what the Boks felt like they were doing when they went into that epoch-making day for this country 12 months ago?

Duane Vermeulen and others summed it up when interviewed for Chasing the Sun, particularly with reference to that period when the Boks had to dig incredibly deep to defend their lines from a sustained and concerted England attack near the end of the first half: “It felt like we were defending our country.”

Which in effect they were. Or more particularly, they were fighting tooth and nail to save their country, to try and make it a better place, a land less fragmented and more unified than it had appeared to become.

They fought to give hope to inhabitants who know hardships, meaning hardships that would be alien to the supporters of most other top rugby nations, where the sport, with the possible exception of Wales, is usually the chosen sport of the more well-to-do classes.

Skipper Siya Kolisi speaks in episode 5 of Chasing the Sun about how coach Rassie Erasmus, who had arrived in the job adamant that a key to success was to eliminate extraneous motivations for playing, and who directed his players make rugby “the main thing”, had come around during the World Cup to the bigger picture the team were playing for.

And there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind, once you have watched Erasmus’ speech to the team on the day of the game, and the sheer emotion on his face and in his eyes as he recalls the events of that day, that by the end the coach was completely brought by it.

The concept of trying to inspire the players to play as if their bodies don’t belong to them is not entirely new. Former Springbok John Allan, that rare breed of player who represented two countries, will tell you that Scotland captain David Sole, in an emotional pre-battle speech, said something very similar before Scotland beat England in a historic Five Nations decider in 1990.

But then that talks to the point. You’d imagine that the Scots, and the Celtic nations generally, being aware of the long history of war, invasions and land occupations involving them and their historic enemy, might have a similar ‘more than rugby’ motivation when they play England.

It might explain why Scotland, though they lose to England more than they beat them, do tend to punch above their weight against an opponent that is far richer when it comes to rugby resources.

Even when it comes to the Scots, and their innate dislike of the English, you’d have to say though that if you compare their motivation to beat England to the South African motivation to unite and maybe save a country, which tends to become the narrative when a World Cup final is reached, you’d have to multiply it by three.

ONE DAY WHERE YOU CAN HAVE NO REGRET

You can watch Erasmus’ speech yourself, but part of his stirring speech to the players revolved around a World Cup final being the one place you couldn’t afford to let yourself get into a situation where you live with regret afterwards.

“This is the one place…you might have been in a Currie Cup final, that is good, you could have been in a Super Rugby final, that is great, but the World Cup is the biggest final there is in rugby, there is no bigger. This is the one place you can’t have a regret,” said the Bok coach.

“You don’t have the right today to worry about your mistakes, to be windgat, to be driven by ego. You are not representing yourself today. You have to think of all the people in our country who are suffering, there are so many different things we play for, we all come from different lifestyles. I was always the guy who said that you don’t play to give people hope, that you have to look after your game first and focus on that.

“But now you are playing well, you can play to give people hope and that is what I am asking you to do. If you play shit today you don’t have a right to drop your head. If you miss a play you stand up and go to the next play, if you miss a tackle you stand up and go to the next cleanout, the same if you miss a high ball, just think about the next thing you have to do, don’t think about what you have just done.

“Do you agree that we are not representing ourselves today, that you don’t have to worry about yourselves? I just want you some confirmation, you can nod your heads,” he added.

NATIONALISM DRIVES BOKS AT A WORLD CUP

Erasmus summed up with his words why, once they get to a World Cup final, the Boks are so hard to beat. They have something that no other country could hope to replicate, and which the former All Black coach Graham Henry remarked on after visiting the Bok changeroom when John Smit’s team won the 2009 Tri-Nations.

Henry, noting the words and posters pinned on the walls of the Bok changing room, was amazed about the difference in the motivation of the two respective arch-rival rugby nations - one played for the jersey, the other was driven by nationalism.

The theme of giving the people of South Africa hope, of course, did extend through the previous four episodes, but it was intensified in the final episode. As was the South African need to get extra motivation by focusing on something said by the opposition that could add fire to the bellies. This time it was the words of Mako Vunipola, who said he was ready for a physical battle with the Boks.

“Let’s bring it on,” he said, to the amusement of prop Dan Coles, who shared a platform with him in one of the pre-match press conferences.

That was actually an outlier in a week where England, and particularly their coach Eddie Jones, were noticeably reluctant to bait the South Africans by getting into a verbal joust. But it was enough for the Bok coaches to pick up on and feed to their players.

“The one thing you do not do to South African players is challenge them to a physical confrontation,” agreed coach Jacques Nienaber.

PLAYING NOT AGAINST A TEAM, BUT A WHOLE COUNTRY

It was a relatively small thing, but enough to add to the overall narrative of this being a war, this being a moment when the country was being defended and fought for, and in the words of Vermeulen, a line in the sand was being drawn across which the opposition would not be allowed to cross.

In the non-World Cup years, that is an attitude that is difficult to replicate, the emotion we saw in Episode 5 cannot just be repeated day after day, match after match, season after season.

It is something that can be produced on specific occasions, and it explains perhaps why South Africa has won three out of seven World Cups the nation has participated in, and yet the Boks have only won four out of the 24 Sanzaar international competitions they have played in since the start of the professional era.

If you look at the respective strengths of the England and South Africa teams at this point of their development, there probably isn’t much to separate them. You’d suggest that in the years between World Cups, the results would pretty much even out at 50/50, which was the case over the last World Cup cycle.

But what the emotional final episode of this excellent docu-series told us was that in a World Cup, it is different. If the England players watch it they may figure out that they probably shouldn’t have bothered to get out of bed on 2 November 2019, because they had no chance. And I wouldn’t disagree with that perception.

We are reminded, and not for the first time across the five episodes, that when you play South Africa in a World Cup final, you are not playing against another rugby team. You are playing against a whole country, and a motivation you probably have to be South African to fully understand.