Currie Cup final 1990: A day that changed things and got a whole province drunk

It was the year it felt like I had forever been trying to avoid. Then suddenly life started to smile on me. First came the announcement that military service was to be cut from two years to one. Then when my dreaded first day as a conscript arrived, it was announced that Nelson Mandela was to be released from prison.

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Just like that the 12 months - actually it turned out to be less than that - in the SADF became more palatable for this graduate of the liberal minded Politics and Journalism departments at Rhodes University. We weren’t serving the apartheid government anymore, or at least that was how I reasoned it, but a country that was about to undergo huge change.

It was 1990. It was the year South Africa finally started the move to democracy. It was a year where the military folk at Natal Command, known as Hotel Command, where I served the bulk of my time, quite appreciated that they had in their midst, as one colonel put it, “someone who thinks like the enemy”. What could have been a problem became an asset.

It was also the year that Natal won the Currie Cup for the first time. How can I list that moment alongside the macro and micro, the wider and more personal experiences of that year? Well, if you lived through that time and remember the background to Natal’s first ever success, and in their Centenary Year to boot, there was a link.

JAMIESON’S RAIDERS WERE A DEPARTURE FROM THE NORM

For having a team captained by an English-speaking law graduate from Maritzburg with an unruly mop of hair named Craig Jamieson was a massive departure from the norm. Free State and Transvaal occasionally challenged, but the trophy was generally hogged by two teams - Northern Transvaal and Western Province. It was a time when players like Jamieson were considered outliers and outsiders.

General Bantu Holimisa, then the leader in the old Transkei, picked up on that. I can well recall him being interviewed by the old Capital Radio 604 in the days after the 1990 final, where Natal beat Naas Botha’s Northern Transvaal 18-12, and lauding Natal for forwarding the cause of the underdog, the down-trodden, the excluded.

The culture of Natal rugby, now the Sharks, has changed since those days. Success has ushered in a new attitude, a different vibe. A changed perspective. Back then, three decades ago, they were rank underdogs. Former Natal captain Tommy Bedford dubbed Natal the Last Outpost of the British Empire, and for some players that’s how it felt.

A Natal based player, just one of them, being selected to play for the Springboks, was a rare event that made front page news in the Durban newspapers.

THE CINDERELLA PROVINCE

The Cinderella Province. That is what they called Natal, now KZN, back then. At least when it came to sport. Yes, the cricketers generally did okay. Big Vince van der Bijl was captain of the Natal team that became the first side to win the double - the Currie Cup and the Gillette Cup - in my first season of following that sport in the 1976/1977 season. If my memory serves me correctly, that was the 17th time they won the Currie Cup, and they did so again in 1980/81.

But rugby? Forget it. As someone who was a regular King’s Park patron during the B Section years from 1982 to the end of 1986, I can tell you no-one ever thought of Natal winning the Currie Cup.

In fact, although they did beat WP a few times, with a 27-9 win at King’s Park at the end of 1975 and a De Wet Ras inspired 19-16 win in 1979 springing to mind, their successes against Northern Transvaal, known then already as the Blue Bulls, were few and far between. In fact, it happened just once in the modern era before the 1990 final, and that was almost exactly 10 years before that, in 1980 when Wynand Claassen, a Bulls old boy himself, was leading the Banana Boys.

As it turned out, the one survivor from that 1980 team Northerns team to play in the final was the captain, Naas Botha. Nasty Booter, as he was monnikered by former English rugby writer John Reason, missed an easy penalty kick towards the end of that 1980 game that would have levelled the scores.

It was good he did, for it gave me a foretaste then, as a Standard 7 schoolboy at Northlands Boys High, of what was to come a decade later. It was just one Currie Cup win, and it didn’t even win the trophy for Natal, who ended third in the B Section, but the Durban media and the Natal sporting fraternity as a whole went to town on that moment.

That one win could be celebrated in such ecstatic fashion was an indication of the inferiority complex, the Cinderella status, that pervaded. And it wasn’t really until the start of that 1990 season that it began to change.

THE DAY IT CHANGED

I remember the day it changed vividly. There was a test Unions day at King’s Park. It was late March, I’d just been posted back to my home town after basics in Potchefstroom. It was the one perk of doing national service as not only already a graduate, but also married and a father to boot.

Shirts off, warm sun beating down, myself and some friends watched in awe as Natal, having benefitted from the importation of some behemoth forwards such as Wahl Bartmann and Guy Kebble (Rudi Visagie had already been in Durban for two years by then), not just beat WP but hammered them. If my memory is accurate, the final score was 28-6.

Scrummed off the park was what happened to WP the next time they came to Durban for the Currie Cup game, by which time a healthy debate was raging between myself and some of my colleagues at Hotel Command who had Cape or Pretoria roots. Could Natal win the Currie Cup? None of the others thought so, they laughed at me. But I argued the point with some conviction - “Well with that pack, of course we have a chance”.

Even my confidence was eroded though when Jamieson’s men were thumped 29-6 by Northerns in the final league match, which was played just two weeks before the final. The national media wrote Natal off, just like they should the current vintage of Sharks who are preparing for Saturday’s Currie Cup final at the same venue.

JUST SO MUCH BANANA PEEL IN THE SKY

“Thoughts of Natal winning the Currie Cup next Saturday amount to just so much banana peel in the sky,” was how the Sunday Times’ Mark Smit saw it in his preview. I remember it well. I also remember how the other newspaper writers and broadcast commentators wrote Natal off.

While that league defeat made me doubt, there were a few things that still offered hope. The Currie Cup final match-up had already been decided by that game, so it was effectively a dead rubber. There was also another thing that to me changed in those two weeks - Hugh Reece-Edwards, the well-built Natal fullback with a booming field kicking boot, returned to full match readiness after being injured for much of the season. Natal needed him if the Botha field kicking threat was to be blunted.

Then there was another thing that no-one outside of the Natal camp would have known about. Andre Botha, a former Natal captain and a lock who had played in the afore-mentioned 1980 game, had been retired all season. But wily Natal coach Ian McIntosh engaged him in conversation and Botha ended up travelling clandestinely with the Natal team when they made an early, unpublicised move to the highveld.

In the match program the Natal locks were Steve Atherton and Rudi Visagie. John Plumtree was down as the No 7 flank. But when the black and white clad Natal team, with a confident looking Jamieson leading them, ran onto the field, there was Botha kitted out in the No 4 jersey, and Atherton was on the flank. Plumtree was benched.

As this happened, the Bulls were also set back by bad luck, with one of their players injuring himself running out of the tunnel. He didn’t make it onto the field, whereas Natal had a player who hadn’t played all year waiting for them on the lush Loftus playing field.

THE SCRUM SET IT ALL UP

That, and the confidence mirrored in Jamieson's eyes, wasn’t what got me going though. That moment was to come a couple of minutes into the game. The Northerns pack was expected to be dominant, as it had been a fortnight earlier. Instead, it was the Natal big men, with outsized Wallaby Tom Lawton fronting their charge, that dominated. They pushed the Bulls off the ball, and sent a nervous clamour through the Loftus crowd as they did so. Then as now that meant a lot.

It set the tone for the game as Natal, helped in the build-up by sports psychologist Ken Jennings, managed to do what they failed to do on their previous visit by settling quickly.

By contrast the hosts looked stunned and were for most of the first half. Natal led at the break and they deserved their lead. In the second half Northern Transvaal came back at them, and for a while, after they scored a good try through the late fullback Gerbrand Grobler, it looked like they might knock Natal out of the contest.

It didn’t happen. The Natal forward effort remained strong. They got themselves just enough territory through the efforts of flyhalf Joel Stransky and Reece-Edwards to give them a chance. And then the chance came. Trailing 12-9, Natal ran the ball to the right, with Dick Muir - who else - showing his great ability as a play-maker as he saw the space and played towards it with a pinpoint and snappy pass.

There were a couple of missed tackles on Natal wing Tony Watson but it seemed like it was all happening in slow motion to us Natal supporters as he burst free and went through to score. He was tackled after dotting down, so when the game restarted with Natal leading 15-12, referee Freek Burger made the crucial decision to award the visitors a penalty from the halfway mark.

STRANSKY TURNED A SIX POINTER INTO A NINE POINTER

Stransky stepped up to take it and effectively turned what had been a six-point score into a nine pointer. Natal led 18-12 with just a few minutes left. The Bulls had one last burst, but they were tackled into touch, which was the cue for Burger to blow the final whistle. As he did so, Visagie lifted him up off the ground in celebration. If that happened today, given recent events overseas, the big lock known to everyone as Vleis might have been red carded.

But he wasn’t and lifting people up suddenly became the things that Natalians just do. Jamieson was hoisted high, other players took it in turns to hoist each other in jubilation. I watched the game at the home of a former teacher of mine, Keith Hosken, who played cricket for Natal in the mid-1970s.

THE WHOLE PROVINCE WAS PLASTERED

We were all pretty plastered by the time that final whistle blew, and to be fair I was way too nervous to watch that game sober so it started some time before kick-off, but going outside into the garden there was just a cacophony of noise throughout the Glen Hills valley where Keith lived. For the moment it seemed like the whole province might be drunk.

This was going to be an occasion for Natalians to party long and to party hard, and they did that in style. The ticker tape parade which saw the Natal team parade the trophy through Durban city centre the following week, with players taking it in turns to do down downs from the Cup at the bidding of the cheering throngs, was the first of its type as far as I can recall in South African sport. Certainly, in the modern era.

And oh yes, lest it be forgotten, those Durbanites who travelled to Pretoria for the game had their party too. A sign was erected alongside the N3 freeway near Van Reenen, where you find the border between Natal and the Free State. It said “Welcome to Currie Cup country”. It’s a long shot for that sign to make a reappearance this coming Sunday, but then it was considered a long shot back in 1990 too…