LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL
It wasn’t by design, but the way the Castle Lager test Series has played out has at least ensured that there is now extra significance to what is an historic occasion for rugby in Cape Town.
The Springboks played three tests against the British and Irish Lions last year and many of them also featured for South Africa A at the same venue, so they will not be new to wearing the green and gold at the DHL Stadium.
But it will be the first test they play there with spectators present, and thanks to last week’s loss in Bloemfontein, there’s now a lot riding on the game and the two close results will have ratcheted up interest.
Of course, the stadium built for the 2010 Fifa World Cup has seen some pretty big occasions already this year, with the Stormers’ impressive form in the Vodacom United Rugby Championship culminating in a final that the home team won to break their duck when it comes to international franchise trophies.
The atmosphere at the Stormers games in the business end of the season was already pretty electric, and in those games the crowds were limited to 50 per cent of the venue capacity. There are no limits now so we can look forward to something that should rival the atmosphere fans' experienced in Bloemfontein and Pretoria.
I’d say it could eclipse it, but I think the atmosphere that Bloemfontein provided last week will be hard to beat.
A GREAT VENUE
Those who have travelled to Cape Town for the Sevens will know what I am talking about when I say that the new home of Cape rugby provides the best rugby watching experience in the country, and possibly even the world.
The concourse around the stadium makes everything easily accessible and it is ideal if you are looking for an experience that goes beyond just watching the match itself. With a full stadium expected, hopefully there will be more beer gardens around the perimetre helping drive the pre-match atmosphere.
Stormers coach John Dobson said after the URC final that the stadium has a lot to look forward to, and he is right. Saturday’s experience will be followed up by the World Cup Sevens in September, and apart from the annual Cape Town Sevens that is set for December, there will of course be the first Champions Cup games plus the beginning of the Stormers’ defence of their URC title. After two years of drought, it is time to let the good times roll.
BIGGAR IS A NICE FELLOW WHO SELLS THE GAME
One player who will be relishing the prospect of playing at a packed Cape Town Stadium will be Welsh captain Dan Biggar. I was glad to see he was passed fit to play in the decider for he has clearly relished being in South Africa and experiencing a tour of this country as it should be experienced.
The flyhalf, who wore the British and Irish Lions No 10 in all three test matches last year, isn’t every South Africans cup of tea during the heat of battle, and his remonstrating with the referee, particularly in Pretoria, got backs up. But he was on the money afterwards when he pointed out that is his role. To beat the Boks, you have to fight fire with fire, you need to get under the home players’ skin and not let them dictate terms.
To my mind, the one thing Biggar does better than any of the Bok players at the moment is sell rugby when he sits in front of a press conference. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the Boks are being coached on what to say, as the same lines get trotted out.
“We are focusing on ourselves” might be what they are doing but to answer that way every time they are asked what they think of their opponents does nothing to sell the game. Surely rugby players have an opinion and are allowed to have an opinion? With full stadiums at all three tests and more to come when the All Blacks arrive, it might not appear the game needs to be sold particularly aggressively in this country, but we all know how quickly the pendulum can swing.
Far from being the brat he appears to be sometimes on the field, Biggar has been engaging and friendly off it and forthcoming when asked questions. He has spoken about how much he has enjoyed playing in front of packed “old school” stadiums with real atmosphere after experiencing the soulless atmosphere of last year’s Lions series.
After the Bloemfontein game, he was particularly looking forward to playing in front of a crowd at a venue that he got to know well last year but which was unable to provide the kind of experience Saturday might.
SHORT MEMORIES
The backlash to last week’s Bok defeat was predictable and also exposed the memory blanks that South African rugby supporters sometimes appear to experience. I wrote before the Bloemfontein game that the 14 changes that were made from the previous test was a record, for you can’t get much more than 14 changes to a starting team, but I was also being forgetful. Jake White’s teams in Australia and New Zealand in the 2007 Tri-Nations must have come pretty close to it.
To refresh memories, when the Boks lost to the All Blacks at Kings Park in their final home Tri-Nations game of that season, coach White decided he’d go with an understrength squad to Australasia. From memory, there were very few first-choice players who made the trip, and the side was captained in the one game by Johann Muller and in the other by Bob Skinstad
The selections were directed around the need to give some respite to first choice players ahead of the World Cup and many critics, this one included, jumped to White’s defence when he was criticised in New Zealand and Australia for devaluing the competition. The World Cup is everything in a World Cup year.
The next World Cup is further away, but White must have forgotten he sent an understrength team on that trip when he wrote in a column on another rugby website that the most successful Bok coaches, referencing himself, Nick Mallett and Rassie Erasmus, kept their strongest team together.
If you ask Mallett to look back at his coaching career with the Boks, my money says he now regrets not mixing up his selections on his northern hemisphere tour in 1998 in the way that New Zealand have for many years. He’d tell you that had he given some of the first-choice players, such as Gary Teichmann and Henry Honiball, some rest opportunity on that tour, there might not have been the injury and fatigue issues that influenced some of his more controversial selections in the all-important World Cup year that followed. And he’d also have grown his depth.
Erasmus has mixed and matched teams, he did it in both 2018 and in the 2019 World Cup year - remember the home games against Australia and Argentina. Both of those games were won, and the Boks were winning last week’s game in Bloemfontein too until the 78th minute. Which wasn’t what an understrength team White fielded against Ireland in Dublin in 2006 came even remotely close to doing. What that game did do, and the understrength tour it was a part of, was give him Frans Steyn. Had the the19-year-old Steyn not debuted on that tour, he would not have been in a position to play the strong role that he did in the 2007 World Cup.
Peter de Villiers followed White’s lead by sending an understrength squad to Australasia in the 2011 Tri-Nations that prefaced that year’s World Cup and was pilloried both at home and abroad by people who had clearly forgotten what had worked successfully for White four years earlier, when the Boks did win the World Cup.
The Boks did end up losing last week but the performance was overall better in my view than the one produced the previous week at Loftus by the so-called first choice team.
WHAT DOES DEVALUED MEAN IN THIS DAY AND AGE
The charge that by choosing an alternative team a coach is devaluing the jersey does require some scrutiny. The Boks play teams like Wales far more often than they used to, and on the record of games between the two countries you’d find a loss suffered by the Boks in Rassie Erasmus’ very first game in charge.
It was in a Washington exhibition match that still counted as a test match. If we looking for the record number of changes from one week to the next, that would have come close, for it was a very different Bok team that beat England in Johannesburg the following week. The one that lost in Washington was a second-string team, even more so than the one that played in Bloemfontein was.
My point is that the extra workload of the modern international player, and the importance attached to the World Cup that happens every four years (okay, I agree that is sometimes overdone and could write a whole separate column on that subject), makes the kind of selection Jacques Nienaber came up with last week both justifiable and, in the long run, probably wise too.
A DIVERSION
So, I am now back in Cape Town after my road trip following the Boks, but it was not before the interesting diversion of a few days in Hermanus to be near the Bok hotel at the Arabella Estate. My colleague Brenden Nel and I shared a self-catering unit just metres away from the waves and tried gamely to stick to a promise that while there for the three days we’d just eat seafood. We failed in that endeavour as red meat found its way onto the Braai on the last night.
For those interested in the narrative of the fuel expended on the trip that I started in my first diary entry after the Pretoria test, my vehicle was on 13.8 kilometres per litre when I left Cape Town two weeks ago, and that had been reduced to 12.6 by the time I reached Johannesburg. That’s not surprising as it was an uphill journey.
My deviation to Durban from Johannesburg, mostly downhill, took me to 13.1, which isn’t surprising as if you want to, you can freewheel parts of that journey, like Van Reenen’s Pass. What was interesting though was that I resolved to travel more conservatively from KZN to Bloemfontein. That is mostly uphill, but I managed to progress to 13.4 km to the litre. It is now, after the downhill drive down the N1 and then the deviation to Hermanus, back at 13.8, where it all started.?As I said from Joburg, there’s probably a book to written about how to tackle petrol consumption issues in these times when a tank of fuel costs you more than a night’s accommodation at a good hotel.
There’s probably also a book to be written about how the state of this country’s railway network is impacting on the number of lorries on the road… And how loadshedding dominates the chatter on various regional radio stations that pop up when you drive around the country.