The gap between the All Blacks and Springboks that has been opened up in the post-isolation era can be made up if South African rugby sustains the environment that helps the country’s top players become more like the lions in the Kalahari than the ones in Kruger National Park.
The two teams go into Saturday’s opening Castle Lager Rugby Championship confrontation in Nelspruit, which is within a stone’s throw of South Africa’s famous Kruger National Park, having played 101 matches since they first battled it out way back in 1921. New Zealand have won 60 of those games and South Africa 37, but it was a markedly different story up until 1981 and the start of isolation.
Since 1992, the All Blacks have been dominant, but it has often been a case of South Africa conspiring against themselves, much like the Kruger lions may do if you compare them to the lions found in the Kalahari.
Those who have visited both the Kgalagadi Transfrontier National Park and Kruger might understand the differentiation in the two sets of lions. The lions, particularly the male ones, in Kruger tend to be smaller than the magnificent beasts that inhabit the Kalahari. There are probably many reasons for this, but some of those who study lions say it is because there is less internecine rivalry when it comes to the latter set of lions.
In the Kruger there are more lions inhabiting less space, or so we are told, and that leads to massive conflict that takes a physical toll on the lions. In the Kalahari there is less conflict, less competition for space and territory, and as a result the lions thrive. And look more brutish and fitting of the king of the jungle reputation, though in their case it would be king of the desert.
So what does all this have to do with rugby and the Springboks? Well, there has been a similarity between SA rugby and the Kruger lions since 1992, when South African rugby returned from the isolation imposed because of apartheid. In the sense that the tribalism built around provincial identities, and interests, which became stronger during the years when there wasn’t much international rugby, set up a culture that has often worked against the best interests of the national team.
Like the Kruger lions, SA rugby hasn’t always helped itself, and the tendency to figuratively take out a 12-bore shotgun and shoot their own feet full of holes has held the Boks back often during the last 30 years since the Boks returned to international rugby by playing New Zealand in a one-off test in Johannesburg.
The All Black win was more comprehensive in reality than the end score, a winning margin of three points for the Kiwis, might suggest. Sean Fitpatrick’s New Zealanders were well ahead until a late flurry of scoring from the Boks made the end score look presentable.
But then it was a miracle that the Boks didn’t lose by a lot more, for it was then that the trend of SA rugby working against itself in the same way that the Kruger lions do, first started to make itself felt. For a start, it was the height of arrogance to think that the Boks could return to international rugby by playing the then reigning World Cup champions.
They might have done better had not a mooted warm-up series against Romania not been scuppered. But there was more than that, the country’s rugby chiefs were also just so preoccupied with their provincial interests.
“WHAT, AM I THE COACH?”
Cue in the Boks’ first post-isolation coach, Prof John Williams. For he had quite a story to tell.
“I first heard about being the Bok coach from someone who had read it in the newspaper,” recalled Williams when I interviewed him for a book on the Bok coaches in 2013.
“I thought to myself that this can’t be, surely if I was the coach someone in authority would have called me to let me know. But the rumours and the stories persisted so eventually I phoned the general manager of what was then Sarfu (SA Rugby Football Union) and asked him if it was true that I was the Bok coach.
“He confirmed to me that it was indeed true, I had been appointed to coach the Boks against the All Blacks and the other tests that were due to be played in 1992 at a Sarfu meeting. Obviously I was quite taken aback. I had travelled to the World Cup in England the year before as an observer. So I knew the Boks had a lot of ground to make up if we were going to be competitive.
“But when I asked if I could stage a training camp I was told that was not possible as Dr Louis Luyt (then already an influential figure in SA rugby as boss of Transvaal and also high ranking in Sarfu) had made it clear that he had a Currie Cup to win and nothing could get in the way of that.”
As it turned out, Luyt’s Transvaal didn’t win the Currie Cup that year. They lost by a solitary point in the final in Johannesburg. The victorious Natal team was coached by Ian McIntosh, who after Williams failed to deliver what a somewhat arrogant South African rugby nation was demanding and Gerrie Sonnekus was axed before ever actually carrying out any coaching duties after an off-field controversy, became the Boks’ third post isolation coach.
COACH HAMSTRUNG ON FIRST POST-ISOLATION TOUR
Again, the South African rugby tendency of working against itself came into play. McIntosh wasn’t a head coach with executive powers. His team was selected for him by a selection panel of seven. Many of those selectors weren’t people who understood McIntosh’s direct rugby, which these days is the way every team plays but back then was a misunderstood playing style even though it earned Natal two Currie Cup titles in the space of three years.
The internecine conflict of the sort that keeps male lions in the Kruger looking less fit than the ones in the Kalahari was endemic to SA rugby back in those days and McIntosh never stood a chance against his large body of detractors, with his perceived crime being that he was from Zimbabwe, had not played for the Springboks and was coaching a province that was still considered unfashionable despite breaking a century of non-achievement in the Currie Cup under his mentorship.
When McIntosh took the Bok squad to New Zealand for a three test series in 1994, his co-selectors denied him the use of several players he wanted to use on that tour, among them the future World Cup winning flyhalf Joel Stransky. Instead Lance Sherrell was the bolter that the selectors backed. There were others that McIntosh wanted to have along that didn’t make it, and he was also very torn when forced to drop Andre Joubert for the decisive second test of that series.
We will never know for sure, but had Stransky, with his knowledge of the McIntosh way forged through his having played for McIntosh for Natal and with his allround game suited to Kiwi conditions, gone with the Boks in 1994, that series might well have turned out differently. As it was they lost two tests by narrow margins and the third was drawn, so there wasn’t that much in it.
Later on Hennie le Roux, the Transvaal flyhalf and the man who wore the Bok No 10 in that series, was said to have finally got to understand what McIntosh wanted from him and by the end of that New Zealand trip was following the coach’s instructions. But by then it was too late, the series had been lost, and McIntosh lost his job. The horse had bolted.
Kitch Christie came into to do what he called an ambulance job, and his strict disciplinarian approach quickly got the Bok players onside, but many of the Boks who played for him and won the World Cup in 1995 will agree that they followed the style that made McIntosh so unpopular.
INHERITING A POISONED CHALICE
Christie ended unbeaten in 13 tests but sadly ill health prevented him from building on that start.
His replacement Andre Markgraaff inherited a poisoned chalice in the sense that there was a lot happening behind the scenes in South African rugby in those days.
One of the problems that blighted Markgraaff’s reign was the disparity between what the 1995 World Cup winners were earning in comparison to newcomers to the team such as Gary Teichmann, Henry Honiball and Andre Venter. The contracts had been given to the World Cup winners in order to keep them loyal to SA rugby in the face of a threat posed by a group called the World Rugby Corporation that wanted to change rugby in the same way Kerry Packer had cricket less than two decades earlier.
Making it more problematic for Markgraaff was his perception that many of the players who’d won the World Cup were no longer at their best, and it will be recalled that there was a massive national controversy when Markgraaff dropped World Cup winning Bok captain Francois Pienaar. Markgraaff’s old school approach also meant the late James Small, at that stage at the top of his game, ended up missing the All Black series because of his failure to meet a curfew in the build-up to the first test.
The upshot of all of this was that there was a lot of focus on everything other than the rugby during the 1996 home series against the All Blacks, with many meetings about financial concerns. Given that background, it should hardly be surprising that the Boks ended up suffering their first ever series defeat to the Kiwis on South African soil.
SHORT RUNS OF BOK SUCCESS
Since then there have been some short runs of success for the Boks against the All Blacks, most notably when Nick Mallett, Jake White and Peter de Villiers were coaching. However, generally the trend of being held back by self-created pressures and obstacles has remained constant. As an example there was the rather bizarre decision on the part of the then coach Rudolf Straeuli to take his players out of their comfort zone and put them in an unannounced hotel an hour away from Pretoria before the 2003 Loftus Tri-Nations test against the All Blacks.
It was the last thing the Bok players needed the night before a game against the All Blacks and it was hardly surprising they lost by what until recently was a record score against the Kiwis.
But since Rassie Erasmus took over as national director of rugby, and with Mark Alexander as SARU president and Jurie Roux taking a firm lead as SA Rugby CEO, the governance of the game in this country also appears to be on a more even keel than it has been for much of the 30 years since that first Bok post-isolation test against the All Blacks at Ellis Park.
Now that the people vested with taking the game forward are no longer attacking each other and holding each other back like the KNP lions do, and with Erasmus bringing in a professionalism that was previously lacking, the Boks are starting to profit from the stability in the same way that the Kalahari lions have.
With the post-isolation Boks also selecting from a playing pool several times bigger than the playing pool that Boks were chosen from in the pre-isolation era, when only white players were selected, there’s no reason to believe the dominance that the All Blacks have enjoyed over their old foe for most of the last 30 years will continue. It all comes down to stability.
FACT FILE
Number of games between Springboks and All Blacks: 101
Number of games won by Springboks: 37
Number of games won by New Zealand: 60
Matches drawn: 4
Biggest New Zealand points tally on SA soil: 57 (2016)
Biggest New Zealand points tally on NZ soil: 57 (2017)
Biggest SA points tally against All Blacks in SA: 46 (2004)
Biggest SA points tally in New Zealand: 36