If there was one non-South African who knew the British and Irish Lions and the travelling media were making a mistake by being belligerent towards the Springboks after the first test of last year’s series it was Felix Jones.
The Irishman who works as one of the assistant coaches in Jacques Nienaber’s Bok management team neatly summed up in the final episode of Two Sides, to be aired on Sunday, what should have been obvious to all but was maybe neglected by the opposition and their supporters during the business end of the fiercely contested series - “When you challenge South Africans, it is like pressing the red button.”
Jones would have seen it before, in 2019 in Yokohama in the build-up to the Rugby World Cup final against England, who so many people from that country were already proclaiming as champions.
The Boks love a fight, and while that old image of a laager mentality enveloping the team is usually meant negatively, it also works for the South Africans at big moments.
Goading them, ridiculing them, criticising them, carrying a triumphalist attitude and writing them off is exactly what the Boks want. Cast your mind back to the then coach Rassie Erasmus’ call to arms speeches we saw in Yokohama in Chasing the Sun in 2020.
It happens again in the Lions series, and as is shown in Two Sides, the opposition and their media helped inspire it by throwing fuel onto the flames of a view that it was the Boks up against the rest of the world.
Witness the words to his players in the build-up to the second test, where the Boks were facing a do-or-die situation, of their coach Nienaber: “If they want us to go to the trenches, we will go to the trenches. They f***** with the wrong team.”
Yes, once again there are plenty of expletives, both from the Boks and the Lions, but that’s what you should expect if you go behind the scenes to get a proper view of what goes on in a high stakes Lions series. It happens only every four years for the Lions, and every 12, meaning once in a lifetime for the South Africans, Kiwis or Australians. It ups the ante for everyone involved and it makes the contest seem so much more than sport.
That the Boks maybe went too far was expressed in the build-up to the second test by Lions coach Warren Gatland in response to the Rassie video that was the topic that closed episode two.
“It just amazed me. I’d never seen someone do that before. To me it was just another example of trying to win at all costs,” said Gatland of an hour long video that Erasmus claims wasn’t leaked but the Lions clearly felt was.
After his team lost the second test, Gatland said that “What Rassie did clearly worked.”
Meaning that his attempt to influence the referees worked, but what really happened in that second test, and in specific the second half of that test, that the Lions were just swept away by an unstoppable force fired by a mixture of anger and wounded pride. You don’t need to give the Boks magic potion like the cartoon character Asterix was to give him extra strength, you just need to make them feel set upon.
Bok vice-captain and flyhalf Handre Pollard continued the theme started by Jones.
“There was a lot of chat about the Lions going 3-0 up, which I thought was very stupid, because you don’t want to be talking down the Springboks,” said Pollard.
In other words, thanks are due to the UK and Irish media, and those more publicly talkative members of the Lions management or playing staff, for the motivation. And boy were the Boks motivated in the first halves of both the last two tests, both games where the Lions could have been out of sight by halftime were it not for the determined, draw a line in the sand and don’t cross it defending of the Boks.
When the chance came to profit from their resilience, the Boks took it in the form of a Makazole Mapimpi try in the second test that set up the most one-sided result of the series, and a moment of Cheslin Kolbe brilliance in the deciding test that brought the Boks back into the game and set up the tense finale where Morne Steyn won the game and the series for them.
“He’s good, he is good. I will give him that,” was the charitable and admiring comment of the Lions’ Liam Williams afterwards.
Speaking of Williams, he also showed us the human side of sport, and perhaps provided an example of why some former Lions have suggested that there should be care taken of looking after the mental health of players at the end of series of that nature. Unlike at a World Cup, the four nation nature of a Lions squad means that players go their separate ways afterwards and get to carry the burden of disappointment in a lonelier fashion.
It was Williams who failed to make the pass that most felt would have sent Lions wing Josh Adams in for a certain try in the first half. It was at a stage when one more score for the Lions would probably been the killer blow.
“No, I still haven’t spoken to anyone about that pass. I cried when I got home. That is the nature of it.”
In other words, a series like that makes heroes of the winners, while the losers often live with scars long after.
*The final episode of Two Sides will be aired on Sunday on M-Net at 6pm and SuperSport at 7pm.