IT’S WHY WE HAVE A GAME
Back in the day, when South Africa was participating in Super Rugby, the excellent New Zealand commentator Tony Johnson used to write an interesting, informative and entertaining rugby column for this website.
As the big clash between international rugby’s traditional old foe and powerhouses of the game, the All Blacks and Springboks, has drawn nearer, I remembered what Tony once wrote about the Australian columnist Spiro Zavos.
Apparently whenever Zavos was asked to give a prediction on who would win a game he was covering, his answer would be: “I don’t know, it’s why we have a game.”
Which is how I feel as the biggest game of the rugby year, and arguably the most seismic event in rugby since the World Cup final between the same two teams, approaches. I will have to write a preview for Friday morning, and it will be expected that I give a prediction then, by which time I will be informed by the team selections.
When you are there, which I am not this time, and on this occasion there aren’t any complaints for not being as the appetite for such a long flight through the time zones is not that great currently, it is much easier to take a line.
In Tokyo ahead of the World Cup final against England in 2019 there was a deep conviction, happily told to any platform that cared to listen, that the Boks would win.
That came out of the confidence that coach Rassie Erasmus appeared to have in private conversation, and also how complacent everyone of an English persuasion was. When I went on The Times rugby podcast with Stephen Jones, Alex Lowe, David Walsh and Owen Slot a few days before the game, Walsh was the only person not to laugh at my prediction the Boks would win.
England had thrashed the All Blacks a few days prior to that in Yokohama, and the English line was that it was the greatest ever performance from an England team.
Except that was precisely why I thought they wouldn’t win. They had played their final. Plus the Boks appeared to know exactly what they needed to do. Which on match day they did.
PSTD NEEDS TO BE THERE
The Bok chances of winning at an Eden Park venue where they haven’t won since 1937 under Philip Nel and the All Blacks haven’t lost since 1994 to France’s “try from the end of the world” will be greatly enhanced if Pieter-Steph du Toit and Siya Kolisi are fit to play.
Right now I have no clue if they will or not as the Boks are 15 000 kilometres (at least) away from where this column is being penned.
But even if they are, and even if the Boks had carried on what they did so well for the first 20 minutes against Australia in Johannesburg for something approaching 80 minutes, in which case the whole discourse of the past few weeks would have been completely different, it would still not be advisable on betting your house on them. Or on the Kiwis for that matter.
It is the All Blacks against the Boks, and usually when these two teams play what happens beforehand becomes irrelevant.
THE BOKS MUST ENJOY HENDERSON
When it was confirmed this week that the Boks were doing some of their training for the Eden Park game in the Auckland suburb of Henderson it didn’t spark the kind of envy I have experienced when in the past I have read they are training in the Sydney beach suburb of Manly.
MC, which stands for My Colleague, who used to be referred to in this column as Brenden Nel, and I spent two weeks in Henderson during the last two weeks of the 2011 Rugby World Cup.
Nothing against the residents of that suburb, but it was just far enough, meaning a fairly long train ride, to render a night out in the city a mission of note. And with the Boks having been knocked out of the World Cup by the Bryce Lawrence freak show with those final two weeks to go, not having them there inevitably took the edge off our coverage of the tournament.
Much of that two weeks was spent writing Peter de Villiers’ book, Politically Incorrect, and getting to know the swimming pool lanes in a health centre a kilometre or so down the road. Several weather systems came through in those weeks, as they tend to in that part of the world. It was muck. It was cabin fever deluxe. Most importantly though, the Boks weren’t there, and MC spent almost that entire fortnight in a sulk. Poor me.
WHY WOULD A LEGEND WANT MY OPINION?
As it happens I was at Eden Park the last time the Boks did have any kind of success there. That was for the final test of the 1994 series, where the Boks were held to a draw by the All Blacks. Note the use of that term - “held to”. Because it was like that.
The Boks scored two tries to nil, and looked like they were going to win before they allowed New Zealand to kick the penalties to enable them to escape what would have been their second successive Eden Park defeat. The loss to France had been in the buildup to that series.
No names or pack drill about who lost the South African team that game, but what sticks in the memory is the legendary All Black lock Colin Meads, who was the manager of Laurie Mains’ team in that series, turning questioner to us media people as we waited for the coaches to arrive at the post-match press conference.
“So, you guys are all very clever people, can anyone tell me why one side scored two tries in this game and the other none and yet the game ended in a draw?”
We all looked at each other sheepishly. For in truth it was a question hard to answer, and anyway why would such a legend of the game be asking us.
Meads is no longer with us but if he was and I bumped into him now I might have an answer. It was the Bok indiscipline that cost them. It’s as clear as mud now, but that took 31 years to figure out.
It is something the Boks must watch out for on Saturday, although it is the Kiwis now who look more likely to have their discipline cost them. As it did against Argentina two weeks ago, and also in the World Cup final.
If you are looking for someone to back, that might be something to go on. Although this being a game against the Boks, the All Blacks will probably correct. That’s the thing about the games between these teams.
FLYING OVER A DAY TO HAVE AN ARGUMENT
The start of a journey home from New Zealand, which I did often in the early Tri-Nations years when I was group rugby writer at the Independent Group, isn’t for the faint hearted if you are a nervous flyer.
I will never forget coming back to my hotel room after visiting a dentist - yes, being on tour doesn’t make you immune from toothache - when the Boks were in Christchurch in 1996, turning on the television and being hit by the CNN coverage of the accident involving a TWA airliner taking off from Atlanta heading towards Paris.
That plane pretty much blew up in mid-air somewhere just off the coast (it was during the Olympics held in Atlanta that year too) and of course every television channel gave it saturation coverage that was hard not to watch. The flight home a few days later became particularly foreboding in that week.
Not that fear of flying needs to be a reason for not enjoying the flight back in time - it is also just so long, and because you are flying into headwinds, much longer than the flight in the opposite direction.
That first flight back from New Zealand in 1994 was a memorable one for several reasons though, and not just because of the arduous trek via trans-Tasman flight to Sydney, followed by a four and a half hour flight across Australia to Perth before 11 and a half hours over the sea to Johannesburg. And then for me the extra little hop to Durban.
There was also the commotion in the Perth airport when Jannie Engelbrecht, the team manager, and the coach Ian McIntosh, were hit with the news that the administrators back home were moving against them and it was already in the Sunday media back home.
Would we have a press conference at the Johannesburg airport when arriving to address the falsehoods, in their view, that had been written about and talked about? No-one knew.
In the end it didn’t happen and anyway there wasn’t long before my connecting flight to Durban. Which Mac was also on. We’d had a drink in Auckland the night before departure where McIntosh had said to me “Gav, I think I am gone”.
We agreed I could write what was said, but he was adamant that he wasn’t resigning. It was just that Mac knew the forces were aligning against him. New Zealand had always been known as the Graveyard of Springbok Coaches.
But writing for newspapers can sometimes be a hazardous business. I never wrote that Mac was resigning, or had any intention of resigning, but somehow a news editor at the Sunday Tribune read it that way, and decided to harden up the story and rewrite it. But still under my name. He had the excuse that I was at 39 000 feet at that time over the Tasman and was uncontactable.
So when, after more than a day of travel that went on forever, I arrived in Durban to see my wife and young child for the first time in more than two months, I had something else to contend with.
Mac’s wife Rhona was there, with a Tribune in her hand with the front page story. We’d always got on, but that night her stare was like Mike Tyson eyeing an opponent. And I could hardly blame her.
It wasn’t nice to be misrepresented by your own newspaper, but unfortunately it came with the territory and unlike in these internet days, you couldn’t just change the copy to correct a change. It was there, in black and white. Apparently Mac had resigned. Which he hadn’t.
TRYING NOT TO ATTRACT ATTENTION
“Whatever you guys do, don’t attract attention to yourselves. There are some tough guys in there and they will be looking for a fight.”
That came from a New Zealand journalist as we headed towards an Auckland nightclub in the early hours of the morning during that 1994 tour. I tried not to attract attention to myself, but I must have had something odd to drink, for before I knew it I was being helped up onto the stage.
Who knows why, I don’t remember, but there must have been someone there who thought I was Micheal Jackson.
For they wanted me to dance to Thriller. I was wearing an old ski jacket with very straight arms. It was the days before I started running the Comrades so I was pretty hefty, like a teddy bear. And forever after that incident the Kiwi rugby writers like Wynn Gray knew me by only one name - Mister Blobby. After a television character I knew nothing about, but Wynn very kindly dropped off a booklet at the reception at one of the hotels we stayed in later in the tour. It stuck and it was carried through to South Africa. I have Auckland to thank for that.
NICE TO SEE THE WISHBONE POSTS ARE STILL THERE
So I didn’t fly to Auckland this week but I did fly from Cape Town to Durban. I am up here doing some work on the Sharks and their buildup to the new URC season. Unfortunately not quite in time to go to Pietermaritzburg to cover the Currie Cup game between the Sharks XV and Boland Kavaliers, which I was sorry about as the old Woodburn Stadium has a special place in the heart.
It was good to see on television that what made Woodburn so distinctive the first time I went there as a schoolboy in the late 1970s hasn’t been changed. It still has the wishbone posts.
Natal used to play there once a season back in those days. The 1977 game, a season where Natal first became relegation threatened, against Western Transvaal ended in a 19-all draw and there were people afterwards on the stands, which I notice have given way to grass now on the open side of the field, chanting “Bring back Tommy Bedford”.
The legendary No 8 had played his last game for Natal the year before that, although from memory he didn’t ever officially announce his retirement so there was speculation long into the season over whether he may return to the playing field at some point. He didn’t, although he did bid his farewell for a Natal Invitation team in a midweek friendly the following year.
Woodburn was the venue for the old Varsity Old Boys Club Day, which in my early days of rugby writing was the official beginning of the rugby season in what was then just Natal. It happened in mid-March and everyone complained about it being too hot. These days March is not pre-season but relatively late season.
It was in a game at Woodburn against Border in early 1993 that two significant things happened - firstly, Tony Watson, who’d played something like 145 games in succession for Natal up to that point, was injured and couldn’t play. Thus that long sequence of consecutive appearances was broken.
The other significance was who did play and made his debut that day. It was the first game at senior level for a young Natal lock who ironically had been schooled in the Border region (Selborne College), Mark Andrews.
NAAS GAVE US SOMETHING TO BOO
The most memorable day out at Woodburn though was in the 1980 season. It was a couple of weeks after the end of that year’s British Lions (they were only known as British in those days, the Irish part was only added subsequently) series when Northern Transvaal came down to play Natal.
It was odd that the then NRU should host such a big game in a much smaller stadium in Sleepy Hollow when there were temporary stands up at Kings Park because of the Lions series and so many people wanting to go to the game. Natal were enjoying a good season under the captaincy of Wynand Claassen and they were given an outside chance of upsetting a Bulls team laden with Springboks.
Among those was Naas Botha. It took a while for the visitors to wear Natal down that day, but eventually they did and in the final minutes they were leading 28-6. The game was over, but for some bizarre reason that didn’t stop Naas from lining up for posts off a penalty awarded on the final whistle.
It was the first and only time I ever heard my late father boo and almost everyone in the stadium was doing the same. Naas duly slotted the kick to make the final score 31-6. But Natal made up for it by getting Naas and his team back later in the season as they scored a historic, for it didn’t happen often in those days, win at Loftus. And Naas missed an easy kick not long before the end of the game that would have drawn the scores. Karma?
AN ENTIRE SEASON WITH THE SAME TEAM
Those were different days. In that Woodburn game one of the Natal wings was injured, I think it was Laurie Sharp, and a scrumhalf (Clive Kelly?) ended up deputising on the wing. Believe it or not, that was the only in season game, until a late October or early November send off against France, that there was any change to the Natal starting team.
In fact, we didn’t call it a starting team in those days - it was just the team. Obviously there wasn’t as high an attrition rate then that there is now, and impact subs were in the same realm as flying saucers. In the sense they hadn’t been invented yet.
Here’s the Natal team from my memory that played in every game that year until France arrived and loosehead prop Mort Mortassagne was injured and had to be replaced by a young architecture student, who was writing exams at the time, ‘Basher’ Downs, and I think Attie de Jager was in for Herman van Heerden.
Here it is: Tim Cocks, Laurie Sharp, Ronnie Haarhoff, Dirk Hoffmann, Cliffie Brown, Pete Smith, Peter Manning, Wynand Claassen (captain), Mark Loane, Wally Watt, Hermann van Heerden, Andre Botha, Bennie de Klerk, Don Spiers, Mort Mortassagne.
Botha was just 22 at the time but went on to play for Natal in a completely different era, when they won the Currie Cup for the first time under Craig Jamieson in 1990. Spiers was a hooker ahead of his time, he played like a wing and rivalled the wings for try scoring.
Loane was a doctor from Sydney who was usually a No 8 but was excellent as a No 7 in tandem with future Bok captain Claassen and a tearaway flanker Wally Watt, who later, if my memory is correct, went on to represent his country in surf angling. If Rob Louw wasn’t playing for the Boks that year many of us Natalians would have liked to have seen Watt in the Bok jersey.
Actually that was just the way of the Natal media in those days - I think Bedford started it with all that Last Outpost of the British Empire complaining about the general South African rugby attitude to the region. Natal being ignored by the national selectors was a story virtually every Sunday when the Boks were playing.
Watt, perhaps inspired by the players he was playing in tandem with, had a great season, although old timers tell me who used to bunk work every Monday and stay in bed.
That was the day the Natal coach of the time, Roger Gardner, used to send the Natal team running up and down Goble Road, the steep road near Kings Park. The Natal players of that era called it “Mad Dog Monday”.
Clearly Wally Watt wasn’t a mad dog and in an era that preceded professionalism (by 15 years) might have been ahead of his time.