“Welcome to your worst nightmare!” That was one of the several hostile banners the All Blacks under the captaincy of Sean Fitzpatrick would have noted as they arrived to a frenzied atmosphere in the arrivals hall of what was then Johannesburg International Airport in September 1992.
It was the end of isolation for the Springboks, and the fact they were starting on the comeback trail with a match against New Zealand told its own story. A similar story to the one Wallaby World Cup winning coach Bob Dwyer had touched on in his book about his team’s 1991 global triumph, “The Winning Way”.
Dwyer recounted how after his team won the World Cup by beating England in the Twickenham final, he kept bumping into South Africans who were very eager to press their view that the Australians wouldn’t be true world champions until they had played South Africa.
The attitude adrift among Bok fans at the airpot that Sunday night was similar to that. South Africans during the years of isolation had treated the Currie Cup like it was the World Cup, and the over-estimation of the abilities of the local teams was summed up by Michael du Plessis, a rugby playing genius who had just retired from rugby the year before that.
“I think Natal will win by at least 20 points, I think we’ve moved ahead of the rest of the world,” said Du Plessis in an interview run in the Natal Mercury on the morning of the first match of the tour, with the team now known as the Sharks being the Kiwi squad’s first opponents.
A year before that Du Plessis had been the Bok captain when they won an exhibition match against a South African B team at Kings Park.
One of the national selectors of that time wasn’t shy to tell me what he thought of the strength of Bok rugby - “Bring on New Zealand at 1 in the morning, bring on England at 3, and then bring on Australia at 5, and we will beat all of them.”
It didn’t turn out that way in the opening two matches of South Africa’s rebirth on the world rugby stage - the All Blacks dominated the test in Johannesburg before allowing the Boks back into it with a late but ultimately vain Danie Gerber inspired scoring flurry towards the end, while a week later Dwyer’s Aussies, possibly fired up by their coach’s recollections of what South African fans had said in 1991, were comprehensively the better team at Newlands.
Egg on your face? Yes, large dollops of it. As Stephen Jones, the rugby writer at the English version of The Sunday Times, observed in his book “The Endless Winter”, those two simultaneous tours by the best two rugby nations of the time “proved that isolation hammers your game”.
To me it also proved that arrogance, choosing to start out against the All Blacks and Wallabies instead of easing in against Romania, which was an option, hammers your game too.
FROM ONE EXTREME TO THE OTHER
So you might be wondering what all this has to do with anything that has happened in South African rugby recently. It comes down to how suddenly it feels like everyone is jumping all over each other to go to the opposite extreme of the arrogance that was prevalent 33 years ago.
Or the arrogance that was maybe all around us before the unexpected loss to Australia in Johannesburg at the start of the current Castle Lager Rugby Championship season.
Perhaps when a team makes too much of a habit of winning there is an overreaction when that team loses. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have warned through WhatsApp messages and in general conversation that we mustn’t get too far ahead of ourselves when it comes to our estimation of the capabilities of the Bok team that has scored 110 points across its last two matches.
“Let’s not forget that it was just a few weeks ago that it was all doom and gloom when the Boks lost to Australia,” read one message.
Of course that hasn’t been forgotten but the result also wasn’t the only thing I remember. The first 20 minutes when the Boks were imperious and produced possibly their finest ever quarter of rugby. Wasn’t that the marker rather than what happened subsequently?
It may well have been as there were many who thought the second half of the 43-10 win in Wellington was the best window ever for the Boks, and then quickly adjusted the tag of “best ever” window to what happened to Argentina in the second half at Kings Park.
It’s all moot and nonsense of course. Comparing different eras and trying to draw conclusions over who was the best of all time is fun to do but should never be taken too seriously. For a start, there was a time when winning 67-30 against the Pumas wasn’t that special.
It is now because the Pumas are now probably the equal of the All Blacks and Aussies. If the Boks beat the 2015 All Black World Cup winning team by 33 points that would surely be a stand alone best ever, but New Zealand have slipped in recent years.
That Wellington result was coming, possibly ever since the Boks were much better than a 16 point winning margin in Nelspruit in 2022.
The point though is that there have been three separate windows in the space of just a few weeks where the Boks were almost unstoppable. Was it coincidence that they were all so close together, or is it just possible that is the standard the Boks have set themselves and should try and match every time they play?
As I write that I can hear readers saying “Let’s rather temper expectations”. Why? All this tempering expectations nonsense is a hangover from the Ellis Park game.
WE KNOW WHAT HAPPENED THERE
South Africans shouldn’t be haunted by that game. The recent wins haven’t been some fluke, but a measure of how good the Boks are and how scarily formidable they could become. And it isn’t a Bok team that is ridiculously good, but a Bok squad. For that is what we should really be getting excited about - the incredible playing depth, and numerous options, available to coach Rassie Erasmus.
What happened in Joburg at the start of the Championship is exactly what many, including the Boks themselves, said at the time - they overplayed. They got seduced about how easy it was to run into a 22-0 lead. They ran themselves off their feet, with the balance to their game going out of the window once it started to appear there was enough space available to score a try with almost every touch of the ball.
To use the cricket analogy referred to at the time, a really strong foundation to a good innings was wasted by too early use of the reverse sweep. We’ve all seen that happen - put your hands up Tristan Stubbs - when a player should just about be set for a big innings and then throws it away by being injudicious. The Boks did that in Johannesburg.
Subsequent to that they have continued to be ambitious, but have just played in the V more. Meaning they learned their lessons from Johannesburg and have applied them. Which is what the whole process that Erasmus and his fellow coaches are busy with is all about - finding out what works and what doesn’t, applying a salve to any wounds that become apparent.
The loss to Australia would be a concern if everyone was oblivious to why it happened. But the people that matter aren’t oblivious to what went wrong. So let’s move on from that and just accept that while there may still be the odd hit sustained during the growth process, for it is still a growth process, and Eden Park showed us that this Bok team has the ability to dominate, and for some time.
CHACO’S VIEW HAS BEEN CONSIGNED TO HISTORY
Chaco Kember was an Argentinian coach who coached DHS Old Boys to multiple club titles in KZN around the time the All Blacks arrived for that aforementioned 1992 tour. I can’t remember if it was at that moment, or maybe a year before that when his club had annexed yet another trophy, that he told me he was flummoxed by how poor South African players were at executing the basics of the game.
“There are players coming to me from schools level who cannot pass properly and need coaching in that. They should not need to be coached in such elementary skills at this stage of their rugby development,” said Kember.
It was like that, and it continued for some time. Over the years many overseas coaches when engaged in off-the-record conversation when there is alcohol passing between the lips have spoken about how much they feared the day that the penny dropped for South Africa that there were other ways to play other than simply suffocating opponents with forwards and defence.
The penny has dropped now, probably helped in no small measure by Tony Brown, who if he ever goes on to become part of the coaching team of his native New Zealand might live to regret the moment he helped South African rugby see the light.
I have written about it before, at the start of this week - the Boks used to suffer at the hands of the All Blacks mainly, although not completely, because the skill levels of their forwards outside of their primary roles was not up to scratch. Now they are. The Bok big men have sublime soft skills that must be the envy of all nations, including New Zealand.
Yes, it has taken a while for the Boks to get to the point they got to in the second half last weekend, but then it was always going to. As Brown explained in an interview last month, as attack coach he works more with the forwards than the backs. He also was quite open about the fact that the forwards had to be super fit to play the tempo game that was being aspired to.
Maybe the reason the Boks are now hitting their straps is because a) they have now grown into their game and have a better understanding of what is expected and b) their conditioning is improving.
Whatever the case, the malaise referenced by Mr Kember all those years ago is no longer there.
ALL ROADS DO NOT LEAD TO TWICKENHAM
A Johannesburg based sportswriter was once hauled over the coals by his sports editor for a line he wrote. It was that old cliche about all roads leading somewhere. In this case it was “All roads lead to Ellis Park”, obviously penned before a big game at the stadium in Doornfontein.
After reading that line, the sports editor, a no nonsense task master, barked “So, if you go down Sauer Street tomorrow morning heading south, or you take the Jan Smuts Highway to the north, are you going to end up at Ellis Park?”
Of course not, and neither unfortunately does any road I take this week lead to Twickenham, which is where I would love to be to watch the deciding game in the Championship. I am on the road though. As I write this, I am in a campsite at a venue known as Umziki Chalets, between Mkuze and Pongola, which looks over Jozini Dam in the distance. If you know Zululand, you know where I am.
If I can’t be in London the next best place to be is my timeshare at Kruger Gate, across the Sabie River from the Paul Kruger statue, so I decided, as I often do, to combine work with a bit of exploration. I needed to get to Kruger, I also wanted to be in Durban for last week’s game.
So there was a good opportunity to travel the quickest route to the Kruger from Durban in my opinion, which is to take the N2 up the north coast and into Zululand before branching off to the M8 through Eswatini and Big Bend to Komatipoort.
If there are no hiccups you used to be able to get from Durban to Crocodile Bridge camp in six to seven hours, but these days with the proliferation of heavy vehicles on the road, which they tell me is symptomatic of the declined railway system in this country, it can take much longer.
DRIVE THE DAY AFTER A PUBLIC HOLIDAY
Speaking of which, if you need to do a long distance drive, the day after a public holiday may be the time to do it. I drove from Cape Town to Bloemfontein last Thursday, the day after Heritage Day, and there were so few lorries on the N1 that I made it to Bloem in less than 10 hours. It has been a long time since I managed that.
In the days before heavy vehicles became so prevalent, it was normal to get from Cape Town to Harrismith in a day, and sometimes, if not exhausted, all the way through to Durban within about 15 hours of leaving the Mother City.
It was like those days were back when the roads opened in front of me on the N1 last Thursday, something that could possibly be ascribed to industry being closed for the public holiday so there was no-one to pack the lorries. Make sense? It does to me.
Talking of lorries, the next day the trip along the N5 and then onto the N3, and in particular the N3 part, did present a lot of traffic. The lorries going down and up Van Reenen’s pass were bumper to bumper for large sections of that stretch of road.
It wasn’t as bad though as it was one night when I arrived at the Pyramids Motel, the landmark establishment off the right of the road travelling in the Durban direction halfway down the pass, at around midnight. For some reason I couldn’t sleep and sat watching the stream of lights in the distance, and heard the rumble of the diesel engines, moving in both directions on the pass.
Modernity is not all bad of course. That motel probably had more business back in the day, when it took a whole day to get to Joburg because the routing took you through places like Colenso and Ladysmith. These days it feels like you get from Joburg to Durban in a blink of an eye. At least if you avoid travelling at night when the lorries pile up in both directions.
A CAREER THAT SPANNED TWO DISTINCTLY DIFFERENT ERAS
Durban is a popular place for people from out of town to visit for a rugby test, and one of those last week was the former Natal lock (he was also captain at one point) Andre Botha. We bumped into each other at the Lookout Restaurant in Glenashley the night before the game. He was there with some of his old Durban Collegians clubmates.
I was pleased to bump into Andre because he was mentioned in one of these columns recently. His first season playing for Natal was in 1980, the year that Wynand Claassen moved down from Pretoria to lead a team that also included the Wallaby looseforward Mark Loane and saw Natal finish third in the A Section of the Currie Cup.
He was just 21 when he moved to Durban from East London but quickly settled as a second row partner for Herman van Heerden, a former Free Stater, and those who read this column regularly will recall that one of the outstanding features of that 1980 Natal team was that it went through an entire Currie Cup season without a single change being made.
The only time there was change was when France came to play what was effectively an out of season game in November en route to a test match against the Boks in Pretoria that just so happened to be Morne du Plessis’ last game for his country.
What makes Botha particularly significant is that his career spanned two distinctly different eras not only for Natal rugby but also South African rugby. He went through the doldrums of the Natal B Section years after that successful first season, and was then part of the Natal team that attained unprecedented success by winning the Currie Cup for the first time in their then 100 year history in 1990.
The particularly interesting thing about Botha’s participation in that final was that he had not played for Natal that entire season and had in fact retired from provincial rugby.
But Ian McIntosh brought him back just for the final, although he didn’t tell anyone about it so when Natal ran onto the field with Botha as Rudi Visagie’s second row partner and Steve Atherton switched to blindside flank in place of current Sharks coach John Plumtree, it took both the fans and the opposition team by complete surprise.
My colleagues hate it when I keep mentioning that 1990 final, which is probably why I am doing it, but I have the excuse that it happened exactly 35 years ago this week. Time flies, but Andre still looks healthy, and MC (my colleague Brenden Nel), who is less inclined towards Natal rugby history than I obviously am, recognised him instantly.