The Springboks have won more than they’ve lost in Cardiff, where they round off their tour on Saturday, but the Welsh capital has also played host to some dark moments that have had far reaching implications for the national team.
Bok coach Rassie Erasmus reminded us in his team announcement press conference that he was playing in the No 6 jersey the day that the South African national team suffered its first ever defeat to Wales. That was June 1999, with the game, which was staged as a “summer test” to celebrate the opening of what was then the Millennium Stadium, coming at the end of a tumultuous week.
It was a transitional time for South African rugby, and politics was decreeing that change was in the air. But the players were unprepared for the message delivered to them two nights before the game by the South African Rugby Football Union chief executive, that “this will be the last white Bok team”, and it was a story that dominated the headlines back home.
The first ever defeat to Wales, at that time coached by future All Black RWC winning coach Graham Henry, was hardly surprising given the ructions that went on behind the scenes. Erasmus, in looking back, was a bit off in his memory - he remembered it being about players salaries and the players going on strike.
It wasn’t, but in some senses you might say the players might as well have been on strike, as they were not up psychologically for that game. The defeat to a team they’d scored 96 points against less than a year before that was a blow that the Boks struggled to recover from and it set in process a whirlwind of negativity that severely set back their buildup to the World Cup, which was hosted by Wales later that year.
That they managed to end third, losing only to a freak extra-time Stephen Larkham drop-goal against the Wallabies at Twickenham in the semifinal and then win the Bronze game against the All Blacks at Saturday’s venue was a tribute to who well coach Nick Mallett managed to arrest the fall later on in the season.
JEAN INJURY HAD BIG IMPACT ON 2015 RWC CHALLENGE
The fact remains though that those Boks won’t remember the Cardiff venue with any fondness, and neither should a later Bok captain Jean de Villiers. It was there in the last game of the 2014 tour that De Villiers suffered a severe ligament injury that required surgery and kept him out of rugby for most of the following year.
It was 2015, a World Cup year, and the buildup could be summed up by the words “Will he or won’t he?” In other words, would De Villiers recover in time to lead the Boks at the World Cup in England, and the secondary question given that he would be going in with such little game time behind him if he did make it was should he lead them.
It is impossible to say what the Boks would have done at that World Cup had De Villiers been fit to lead them from the outset of that international season and the squad under Heyneke Meyer had a more seamless buildup. Just as it is impossible to say whether Mallett’s team would have won in 1999 had it not been for the events of Cardiff and his subsequent dropping of Gary Teichmann as his captain.
My view is that Mallett’s team probably would have beaten Australia in London had Teichmann been the captain throughout that tournament, and as France knocked out New Zealand in the other semi, they would probably have won the final in 1999. The 2015 event is more debatable, as the All Blacks were the best team at that tournament, even though the Boks only lost their semi against the Kiwis by a measly two points.
COETZEE’S DEAD MAN WALKING WAS CARDIFF NADIR
Seeing though that the Boks have won four World Cups in eight starts now, as a South African it feels a bit selfish to lament the near misses of another two. What the subject of the Boks winning World Cups does do though is cues the bleakest week the Boks have endured in Cardiff when I have been there, yes even eclipsing Cardiff 1999 when the four SA journalists on tour became known by the Bok management as “The Cardiff Four”.
It was eight years ago, a year after the 2015 World Cup and the end of the Heyneke Meyer reign as coach. Allister Coetzee had taken over and had started the year with a first ever defeat for the Boks against Ireland on home soil, and then after a brief correction the season just went downwards in a rapidly increasing death spiral.
The end of year tour had followed a 57-15 defeat to the All Blacks in Durban, at that point considered the lowest point of SA rugby history, and started off with the tourists losing heavily to Eddie Jones’ England. That was the day Willem Alberts, so obviously a lock or a blindside flank, started on the openside.
In fact, there was a defeat a week prior to that, with the Boks going down at Wembley to a composite global team, so it really was an awful tour.
A trip to Udine in Italy followed the England defeat, where I was so sure the Boks would win comfortably that I planned ahead to stay in London to save money, just using the Bok media liaison of the time, Rayaan Adriaanse, as my conduit for news snippets to stay in touch. It was in a pub at Newquay on a bleak, wintery day on the Cornish coast that I covered the unexpected Bok defeat off television.
The wheels for Coetzee’s sacking were being put in motion then, and when I arrived in Cardiff to a press conference on the Monday morning, Coetzee’s mood, and that of his assistants and his players, was as bleak as the weather. The pain SA rugby was going through matched the pain that seared through my ankle later that night, with a severe bout of gout reducing me to a wreck that required help from fellow sufferer, forwards coach Matt Proudfoot, later the next day, but only after a long night and morning of suffering.
However, that gout attack was far from the nadir of that week in Cardiff. There was some sympathy for Coetzee, who did not have the advantages his successor Erasmus gave himself when he became both the director of rugby and Bok coach in terms of having carte blanche in selecting overseas based players, and who’d been appointed relatively late in the season, not long before the international segment started.
So it was possible to emphasise with him, even though, as I put it in my copy, he looked like “a dead man walking”. The lowest ebb came right at the end of the trip, after the Boks with a changed up team had lost by 20 points to Warren Gatland’s team, in the queue at the main Cardiff Station, which is adjacent to the Principality Stadium.
There were many Welsh supporters in the line as I started the journey back to London, and the attitude was disturbing to me as a South African. There was very little celebration. It just seemed so many light years on from that first ever defeat there in 1999 when I heard Welsh supporters lamenting that their team hadn’t won by more, that the Springboks were a very poor team.
ARROGANCE OF WELSH FANS SHOWED BOKS HAD LOST THEIR AURA
The arrogance of a nation that used to be South Africa’s whipping boys was hard to stomach, but could be placed in context with the subject being debated both over there and by the media back home - have the Boks lost their aura? Coetzee was asked that question a few times that week, and my memory of his responses was that he applied a semantic shift to evade it. What does ‘aura’ mean exactly when applied in a rugby context?
Contrast all of that with now. Coetzee somehow survived into the following year, and it was at the same venue in Cardiff, that he presided over his last test in charge, and lost. However it was already clear before kick-off that his fate was sealed, with Erasmus and his long time right hand man Jacques Nienaber flying home to South Africa like knights on white horses to save the Boks even before that 2017 tour came to an end.
The Boks have mostly been on an upward trend since then, and two World Cup titles have been secured since that disturbing night in that Cardiff train queue. By contrast it is now Gatland, after 11 successive defeats, who is dead man walking, with Wales at such a low ebb that there was surely surprise in many quarters when Erasmus announced such a strong team for Saturday.
They say a week is a long time in rugby so eight years is a sod of a long time, but the South African experience, and the complete turnaround from being a laughing stock to becoming the recognised dominant force in world rugby, in the space of those eight years surely offers one small tiny glimmer of hope to long suffering Welsh fans.
Of course, the Bok experience does also show that to bring about change, change might be necessary in the leadership, which doesn’t bode well for Gatland, who may be right when he says he was unaware of the mess Welsh rugby was in structurally when he agreed to come back for another stint in charge. Why would he have taken the job otherwise?
Watching him interviewed on television after his team conceded more than 50 points to Australia last Sunday he didn’t appear so much as a dead man walking, like Coetzee did, but someone just resigned to his fate. Given the invective targeted at him, and the public scrutiny, he might feel relief if the Welsh rugby denizens decide that change is best for their rugby.