KITCH’S ONE…UM, SECOND LOSS
So, seeing the Barbarians are in Cape Town for their first ever clash with the Springboks, here’s a question - Did the first South African World Cup-winning coach Kitch Christie end his tenure unbeaten?
Most would answer yes, for it is a fact that Kitch was unbeaten in test matches. For the record, the Boks played 13 tests under Kitch, and they won all 13, including of course the 1995 Rugby World Cup final against the All Blacks that so many people will have watched again this week as the country celebrates the 30th anniversary of that seismic triumph.
But Christie did lose as Bok coach. I covered his first tour after he replaced Ian McIntosh as Bok mentor and have a strong recollection of South Africa’s first post-isolation appearance at Dublin’s Lansdowne Road, which was later rebuilt to become the Aviva Stadium.
It was the last game of an overwhelmingly successful tour of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland and it was against the Barbarians.
It was seen as the third unofficial test of the tour, but of course it did not have test status. Let’s call it a quasi-international. The Boks had in fact lost under Christie before that. Although they were convincing victors in the two test matches at Murrayfield and in Cardiff, they did lose at Melrose to a late drop-goal against Scotland A.
But it was that quasi-international in Dublin that I remember more as Kitch’s one defeat, for although not a test it was seen as such by many at the time. Although not necessarily the Boks, which cues another question - do the Barbarians always play in the Barbarians spirit? No they don’t.
Christie’s Boks lost that day to a Barbarians team that played a style of rugby very untypical of Barbarians rugby and much more like a team that had been primed to claim a Bok scalp.
THE ‘BRAINS GAME’ COOKED BETTER THAN THE PROTEAS
I can’t remember how public Christie was in his complaints about the Barbarians approach but certainly in private he was seething. The Boks had warmed up for that game with a crowd pleasing, Barbarians style thrashing of an Irish Combined Provinces team in Belfast a few nights before that game.
There was a good reason that I remember that the Boks, playing a heads up style of rugby, topped the 50 mark that night. Edward Griffiths, later to become the Sarfu CEO, was Christie’s media manager on that tour and he was called by Dr Ali Bacher, then the head of SA cricket, the day after the game to complain, probably in good humour, about the lead paragraph in my match report, which he would have read in The Star.
It went thus: “The Springboks last night used their outing against Combined Provinces at Ravenhill to do something that no Proteas batsman has managed to do in their series against New Zealand - they passed the half century mark”. The Proteas had just been thumped by the Kiwis at the Wanderers.
The Boks by contrast rollicked to their victory, and it was so successful that the “Brains Game”, as Christie called it, was forwarded as an option for the Boks when several months later they were at Sun City preparing for their World Cup final against New Zealand.
Kitch was panicking about Jonah Lomu possibly doing to James Small what he did to Michael Catt, a fear that proved unfounded, and came close to abandoning what had worked for him to that point.
Some of the players from that era tell me they deliberately put Kitch off his plan by conspiring to run into each other and make mistakes in the next training session, but perhaps they should instead have reminded him of what happened against what was, from memory, a very strong Barbarians team at Lansdowne Road. The Barbarians won 23-15.
A DAMP END FOR JAKE AND NEARLY HYPERTHERMIA FOR ME
It seems I might be a jinx for the Boks when it comes to Barbarians games. For I have been to a few games between the two teams, and I don’t recall having seen the Boks win one.
A game that sticks in the memory against the BaaBaas for all the wrong reasons from a South African viewpoint was the one that officially ended Jake White’s tenure as Bok coach. A month after the Boks won the World Cup in France in 2007, they went back to the northern hemisphere for a two-match tour, and I followed them back over the equator.
There was a test match in Cardiff, where from memory Ryan Kankowski made his debut and was outstanding, and then a week later a game against the Barbarians at Twickenham.
Jake didn’t go completely full strength against Wales, and if it were not for the fact that it was already clear that he wasn’t going to continue as coach you could have said he was looking at the future and improving depth, but he was even further away from full strength in the last game.
It was played on a bitterly cold and wet London day, and my memory of it is just wanting to get away from Twickenham as quickly as I could to find some warmth. Alas, for some bizarre reason I found myself walking from Twickenham to Richmond and very nearly got hypothermia.
The Bok team was a mix and match selection and they played like it. The conditions didn’t really promote a Barbarians type game, and it was completely forgettable other than that ridiculous walk in the dark and cold. In fact I had to look up the result to remind myself: the Barbarians won 22-5.
NOTHING FUN ABOUT BAABAAS FOR SERGEAL
More recently I was at Wembley when a Bok team captained by Pat Lambie drew with the Barbarians. It was 2016 and lest it be forgotten, unlike Rassie the coach of the time Allister Coetzee was not permitted to field overseas based players. Well, at least not to the extent that it is permitted now.
The Barbarians game was played without overseas players and it was seen as an opportunity for newcomers to shine. But here is where Rassie has it right in going for experienced players in among the newcomers for Saturday’s game in Cape Town - there were players in that Bok team that were shown up at Wembley and never really featured again. Perhaps unfairly.
One of those was the big wing Jamba Ulengo. Remember him? He played that game and never wore the green and gold again. Ditto for flanker Roelof Smit. But what sticks more particularly in the memory is Sergeal Petersen, who together with his provincial captain Francois Venter had been selected for that tour off their outstanding form for a Currie Cup winning Free State Cheetahs team.
The Barbarians team had several big Pacific island players out wide, and one of them ran over or through Petersen, who did get onto the try sheet that day, just about every time he got the ball, To my mind Petersen was a good enough player to get another chance but he never did.
The Barbarians did for him when it came to his international aspirations, which might explain why the four newcomers on Saturday need some “protection” from the old timers that will play around them.
That Wembley game ended in a 31-all draw and because Coetzee was under so much pressure the result wasn’t greeted in the way results of Barbarians games should be. For all the supposed joie de vivre around these fixtures, the reality is that the results sometimes do matter for the teams that face the Barbarians.
ZERO MARKS TO LIONS FOR THEIR CHOICE OF OPENER
Maybe they were constructed to provide click bait, but some of the headlines around the British and Irish Lions’ loss to Argentina in their pre-tour warmup game in Dublin struck me as ridiculous. “Lions stunned by Pumas” was the general line, like it was a big surprise. It was no surprise to me.
Before the game I thought it was daft for the Lions to be playing a nation in a warmup game that is ranked higher than the team they are warming up for on the world rankings and so it proved. Some might say it doesn’t matter, it was just a warmup or preparation game, but the fact is that the 2025 Lions start the tour with a loss on their record.
I read somewhere that the Scottish fullback Andy Irvine said after Pieter Cronje scored the Bok try that drew the final test of the 1974 series, and thus robbed the Lions of a 4-0 series whitewash, that it meant that at least future Lions squads will have a chance to eclipse their record by winning every game on tour. That final test draw was the only ‘blemish’ in 1974.
If you take the Dublin game as the start of their tour, that is not something they can do on this trip - and they hadn’t even got to Australia yet.
Seriously though, the Pumas have finished ahead of Australia in the last two Rugby Championships, and have been well ahead of them on the rankings for some time. Did the Lions tour organisers not pay any heed to the current world rugby order?
Or the bookies for that matter, for some of them had the Pumas to lose by 17 points. There seems to have been a time-warp in play. The Pumas are a strong team, and even when a bit understrength they can still challenge the best.
The Pumas scrum creaked, and in doing so may have given some Lions the wrong impression of their capabilities (put up your hand Ellis Genge), and yet they still won. Surprised? I wasn’t. The Lions were playing their first game together. Ever! They will get better.
But for goodness sake, they should have warmed up against Japan. Or Italy. Or better still, the Barbarians. That’d have made Saturday’s game in Cape Town more competitive - playing against a Barbarians team that had already played together…
SCHMIDT DOESN’T HAVE MUCH CHOICE
Wallaby coach Joe Schmidt has released five players from his squad to the Western Force, who face the Lions in Perth on Saturday. That is to be lauded, for Lions tours have lost a lot of their lustre and interest outside of the test series since the end of the era where the tourists came up against international laden provincial teams in their tour games.
However, Schmidt releasing players proved to be a mirage, as he now is bulking when it comes to releasing players for the Lions games against the Reds, Brumbies and Waratahs. It thus puts in prospect another series of one sided games like the ones the Lions played here in 2021, when Covid prevented the Boks from playing for their franchises.
The Lions management have questioned Schmidt’s approach and accused him of breaching the tour agreement, but Schmidt in turn has found loopholes in the wording of that agreement. And you also have to side with his approach if you consider that in between the Lions games against the State teams the Wallabies are playing a warmup test against Fiji.
That would make it impossible for the Waratahs to play their Wallabies against the Lions as they play that game a day before the Fiji clash. He doesn’t appear to have much choice but to make his players unavailable.
WEAKENED TEAMS WILL ROB FUTURE GENERATIONS
I do have to agree though with those critics who say that playing weakened teams puts the scheduling of future tours into question. The 2009 Lions tour to SA also featured games that were rendered much less interesting by the fact that the Boks weren’t playing for the local teams.
One of my fondest Lions memories is the first game I ever saw them play live, which was Bill Beaumont’s side against Wynand Claassen’s Natal team at Kings Park near the start of the 1980 tour (I think it was the third match).
The expectation was that the Lions would crush the Durbanites, but late in the game “the mole”, Mort Mortassagne, scored a try to bring Natal level and it required an even later John Carlton try, which until my dying day I will swear came off a forward pass, to win it for the Lions.
Weakening teams is going to rob future generations of that kind of memory, but if the Lions came here now, even if the Boks were left out again, I reckon the SA franchises would make a better fist of it than they did in 2021.
That was a weird time for our rugby, with the Covid restrictions having been applied much more strictly here than in other countries, and the local franchises had been denied overseas competition for a while.
And the top SA side of that time by some distance, the Bulls, who also would have been missing fewer Boks, didn’t get to play the Lions. Instead they took their frustrations out on the Boks, who they beat in a curtain-raiser to the Stormers/Lions game at the DHL Stadium.
There’s been a steady improvement both in performance and in the creation of depth that would, to my mind at least, make our teams more competitive now. That is not to say they’d beat the Lions. Just that the scores would be a lot closer than they were then. Which coming to think about it isn’t saying much as there were games where the Lions went beyond 70.
MY LIONS PREDICTION
After the Pumas game I got into a WhatsApp debate with a colleague - not Brenden, someone else - who told me on the basis of that result that the Lions were going to be thumped 3-0 by the Wallabies. Knowing that the Lions always improve as they come together in the weeks building up to the first test match, I don’t go with that at all.
In fact, having been completely underwhelmed by the ease with which the Chiefs beat the much hyped Brumbies, far and away Australia’s best team, in the Super Rugby final, I’d go for a 3-0 result. But in the Lions’ favour.
It’s always tricky sticking your neck out, as Andy Farrell, like all Lions coaches, faces a tricky task in selection, but if he allows his Ireland team to provide the core of the Lions’ challenge, they will prevail - and with something to spare.
A TALE OF THE OLD AND NEW IN TEST CRICKET
So, one week on from the Proteas’ heady achievement of winning the World Test Championship there was a chance to watch two games on Supersport that would give some indication of where that format of the sport is headed. And what a contrast it was watching Sri Lanka host Bangladesh in Galle in a test that roughly coincided with the one at Headingley.
On the face of it, the first innings of the two games were strikingly similar. Sri Lanka and Bangladesh both produced scores that weren’t far short of the 500 mark, and England and India did the same at Leeds. There wasn’t much to choose between the sides when it came to scores either - Bangladesh led by 10 runs after the first innings’ were completed in Galle, and England trailed India by just six.
Two very exciting games then? No, unfortunately you couldn’t say that, for Sri Lanka completed their first innings well into the afternoon session of day 4. The scoring was slow, the game always looked like being a tame draw. And it was.
It was a blast from the past, for in Leeds it was very different. When India collapsed from 430 for three to 471 all out, it all happened just after lunch on the second day. By the close of day two, England were 209/3. By the close of day three, which came half an hour early, India were batting again after dismissing England for 465, and were 90/2. There’s the big difference.
India will feel they missed an opportunity. Apart from several dropped catches, they also collapsed in both innings when they looked set to play England out of the game. But England would have lost any chance of winning anyway if they’d scored their runs at the old traditional rate, which is what happened in Galle, and only closed their innings on the fourth day.
STOKES HAS REVOLUTIONISED THE FORMAT
Captain Ben Stokes and the England coach Brendan McCullum have revolutionised the England approach and in so doing they have revolutionised test cricket and its watchability. The Galle game, and the scoring rates there, was very much an outlier when it comes to the modern test game and it is why draws have become so rare.
England have only been involved in one drawn match since Stokes became captain, and it was when two days were lost to rain in the Old Trafford test in the last Ashes series. I must confess I was hoping England would lose wickets in a hurry early on the fifth day at Headingley as that would have put Stokes’ “No draw” policy to a proper test.
But everything that came out of the England camp on the eve of that final day was that they were going to give it a full go and were not interested in a draw. That on a day where there would be wet weather around and they were chasing 371 to win (350 by the start of day five). A decade ago that would have been scoffed at, but is now becoming the norm, and test cricket is benefitting from the revolution.