THE RISE OF LOS PUMAS: Why Nelspruit is so important for them

Argentina's Los Pumas have a barrier that needs crossing for them in Nelspruit on Saturday as they effectively bid for their first major rugby title in the Castle Lager Rugby Championship decider, and in one way the venue for their next growth spurt, if that were to happen, would be apt.

It was on a tour to South Africa in 1965, when they played what is now known as the Junior Springboks (age-group team) but then was the Gazelles, that rugby in Argentina undertook one of a few landmark growth spurts in their history. They beat the local team, thus providing a jolt of interest in the sport in that country.

One South African who will always be remembered by Argentina rugby people is Izak van Heerden, the late Natal coach who built that province’s reputation for running rugby in the 1960s. Perhaps that explains why the running rugby ethos has been so strong in the South American country, although in truth that has sometimes been over-emphasised in the past decade or so, as has at times their fearsome and renowned ‘bajada’ scrum technique.

To say that the Pumas have suddenly arrived after their performances of the current Championship would also be stretching it a bit. If you compare where they are to what is happening in T20 and ODI cricket, they are not Afghanistan, who in the last few years have started to shock bigger nations. They are far more the equivalent of Sri Lanka, who won the Cricket World Cup as long ago as 1996, and by the way that’s still a frontier the Proteas have to cross.

1999 INSPIRED MOST SIGNIFICANT GROWTH SPURT

First introduced to the country by Scottish expats working on the construction of the Argentinian railways in 1873, there have been several seminal moments in the growth of Argentine rugby since 1965, perhaps the biggest being in 1999 and 2007, although South Africans who followed the sport in the 1980s will remember some tight games between the Springboks and the Jaguars, who were the Pumas in all but name.

Hugo Porta famously led the Jaguars to a win over the Boks in Bloemfontein in 1982, but perhaps because Argentina were breaking the sports boycott that was in place because of apartheid, and them being identified as the Jaguars, representing the whole of South America, rather than the Pumas, it didn’t have the same impact as what happened 17 years later.

It was at the 1999 Rugby World Cup that Argentina beat Ireland to make the quarterfinal of the global event for the first time.

“Basically, when Los Pumas – perennial underachievers in the biggest of tournaments – made it to the quarterfinals, beating Ireland with a passion and commitment that to this day makes the hairs on the neck rise, it generated an awareness for the game, the team, and some of its stars like never before,” the well known Argentine rugby journalist Frankie Deges wrote in Rugby World.

PICHOT’S TEAM DROVE NEXT EXPLOSION OF INTEREST

The next big spurt came in 2007, at the World Cup held that year in France. The Pumas beat France in the opening game at the Stade de France, something they did quite frequently in those days, perhaps because so many of their players were playing club rugby in France. Captained by the influential Augustin Pichot, they went on to make the playoffs and qualified for the semifinals, where they lost to the Bok team under Jake White that went on to win the Webb Ellis trophy for what was then the second time in South Africa’s history.

The Pumas dusted themselves off after that defeat to win the bronze final, beating the hosts for the second time in the tournament. They didn’t go quite that far in 2015 when the World Cup was hosted in England, but they made it to the last four again, losing to the Boks in the bronze playoff at the London Stadium.

In fact, they’ve made a relative habit of making World Cup semifinals in the past two decades and were there again when they lost to the All Blacks following a quarterfinal win over Wales last year. So no, they aren’t Johnny-come-latelies in the rugby sense and are far from rugby’s equivalent of cricket’s Afghanistan.

Their first ever win over the Boks while playing officially as the Pumas came in a Rugby Championship game played prior to the 2015 World Cup in Durban, when the Boks were coached by Heyneke Meyer, and they followed up the following year on home soil when Allister Coetzee was in charge. They also inflicted a defeat on the Boks in their own country in Rassie Erasmus’ first year in charge of the Boks, so this past weekend’s narrow defeat in Santiago was not new to the Bok coach, or several of his players, either.

WINS OVER KIWIS BROKE NEW GROUND

The most recent one was, though, the only Pumas win over the Boks since the South Africans took their third grip on the World Cup trophy in 2019, and in that time it has been mostly New Zealand that they have made their statements against when it comes to southern hemisphere rivals. They’d never beaten the All Blacks in their history before 2020, but now they’ve done it three times.

For some reason Australia, though struggling on the world stage in the past decade, have been a bit of a bogey team for them, but that changed in dramatic effect when they thrashed the Wallabies 67-27 a few weeks ago. That makes it two wins in succession in the Championship going into the Nelspruit game, which in itself is an achievement, and they’ve also beaten the so-called southern hemisphere big three - New Zealand, South Africa and Australia - in the same year for the first time.

That is something that has only been managed twice by other nations in the entire history of rugby union - Ireland did it two years ago, in 2022, and England did in their World Cup-winning year of 2003.

BETTER DISCIPLINE DRIVES QUEST FOR NEW FRONTIER

It is a major trophy though that eludes the Pumas, and while the odds will be stacked heavily against them as they are playing the No 1 team in world rugby on their home turf, Saturday’s game gives them a chance of going somewhere they have never been before.

As Erasmus alluded to earlier in the week, much of the Pumas’ current success is built around their much better discipline. For a long time the Pumas were considered to be a walking team of certain cards, with Thomas Lavini being perhaps the most carded player in the global game, and you just had to get under their skin in order to bring out their Latin temperament and a rash of cards.

That is not happening under Felipe Contemponi, the former Pumas centre who took over the reins from Michael Cheika after the last World Cup and who did much of his learning as a coach at Leinster.

Argentina are the only team yet to receive a red or yellow card in the Championship in 2024 and have conceded the fewest penalties (50) of any team in the campaign. In fact, the Pumas have not received a red or yellow card across their last 12 test matches – the last time they recorded a longer such run was a 20-match span from November 2017 to September 2019.

GROWTH IN PLAYING STYLE

More than that though, Contemponi has them playing an all-encompassing attacking style that has had us likening them to the French team of old and which saw them score four unanswered tries in the latter part of the first half of the Santiago game. They scored 26 unanswered points in that purple patch - who does that these days against the Boks?

There is no real professional rugby to speak of in Argentina these days outside of two teams playing in the Super Rugby Americas league, which only runs for a few matches, the Argentina XV, which is the second national squad, and of course the Pumas Sevens team, that won bronze at the Tokyo Olympics.

Achievements like what happened in Tokyo are important to Argentine rugby, as indeed would be success in their unlikely bid for a trophy on Saturday (they not only need to win but also score three more tries than the Boks), as there are perceptions that every time there is a notable success it erodes the sport’s reputation of being an upper class sport in Argentina and it undergoes a growth spurt.

It is watched and played by more people from the working classes than was the case in the past, something that can partially be ascribed to the sport shaking off its amateur shackles and becoming professional.

“…doors are opening a bit more than before to youngsters from other (social) sectors,” explained Sebastián Fuentes, a social anthropologist and researcher at the CONICET scientific research council, in an interview with the Buenos Aires Times during last year’s World Cup.

If that is so, and rugby can make some more inroads into the dominant soccer market, which let’s face it is not something that the oval ball game will ever overturn, then the Pumas may become even more of a major factor in the sport than they are already. With Australia struggling as they are, and no longer the force they were when they won two World Cups in the 1990s, that could be great for the sport as a whole as there are too few nations who have a realistic chance of becoming world champions.

It is something that can perhaps be established by taking one important step at a time, as they have been doing, with Saturday’s game in Nelspruit potentially being that next step.