TWO SIDES: Flashback to Gavin Rich's tour diary part 3

As we look forward to the last episode of Two Sides, we travel back in time to Gavin Rich's tour diary at the time, to see its conclusion through his eyes.

That’s Rich: Disgruntled Lions fans should just suck a lemon

ANOTHER OF THOSE TENSE DAYS

It was probably because it was a once in 12-year event, or maybe it was because of the incendiary, spiteful mood that had blown up around the series, or maybe again it was because we were watching a game of great import in a mostly empty stadium. Whatever it was, the day of the final test of the Castle Lager Lions series nearly ranked alongside the World Cup finals in Paris and Yokohama in 2007 and 2019 for tension.

Okay, maybe in the actual build-up on the day, it was a few rungs behind the tense feeling there was before the Paris game, which was made tenser by the presence of so many rather loud England supporters flooding the city at the end of a tournament where their team had been poor and really didn’t deserve to be in with a chance of winning it.

And the absence of crowds of rugby supporters around the Waterfront where I joined fellow rugby writers for another of those pre-game lunches made it different to Yokohama too. There were a few Bok supporters around, in fact, more than there were the previous week, but no opposing fans like there were in Japan on the morning of that momentous day 21 months ago claiming they had already won the trophy because they had beaten the All Blacks the week before.

In fact, the tension that there was on the final day of this series was probably caused by the opposite feeling to what there was in Yokohama. In the World Cup final, there was a desire to see the Boks shut up the English braggarts who were already celebrating their win. In the final test of this series there was the expectation that the previous week the Boks had done a job that now just required finishing. The expectation was therefore similar to Paris in 2007. In both games the Boks rightly entered as favourites, it was theirs to lose.

SO MUCH HUNG ON THOSE FRAUGHT FINAL MINUTES

I have written in one of my previous diaries that maybe the absence of the distraction that is created by crowd colour and noise made the games in this series somehow seem tenser. And that is where the tension went through the roof - in those final minutes when 12 years of bragging rights and the inevitable triumphalism of the UK and Irish media was on the line, it felt unbearable.

I remember looking at the stadium clock when it reflected that there were 10 minutes to go. The Boks held a three-point lead. The thought that crossed my mind was that in 10 minutes from now, we will know. We will know which camp is elated, and which one is sad, which army of supporters watching on television will be celebrating and which will be indulging in the inevitable post-mortems and embittered recriminations that follow defeat in a momentous, deciding game.

Then the scores were level, and there were two minutes to go. A draw, like the one in the last Lions series in New Zealand four years, looked probable. I reckoned that as a South African I would buy that. After all, the Boks went into the series not having played any meaningful test rugby for 21 months. I was never one to subscribe to the line that it would be a 3-0 series win for the Boks. If it was going to be a whitewash, it was more likely it would be the Lions who’d end up being the team to dish it out. They’d just played much more high level international rugby.

That the Boks were still in the fight and probably destined not to concede defeat for me was a win given the weird and different series this was. That is a reference to the fact it was played at sea level and in one stadium for it’s entirety, that it followed on from not only a long period of hiatus from international rugby but also a few weeks after a Covid outbreak that forced several key Bok players to be in isolation in hotel rooms at a time they desperately needed to be training.

Before the series, you also wouldn’t have got many takers for a Bok win if it had been suggested they would go the entire three matches without Duane Vermeulen, for more than half the series without Pieter-Steph du Toit, and the final game without Faf de Klerk to boot.

Had the Boks just remained in the Lions' half for those final minutes and there’d been no scoring, perhaps the result might in some ways have been fitting too. After all, the Lions also had to make great sacrifices to be here. And they still are, for they are now in Jersey, which they decided was better than the alternative, which was to spend two weeks isolating in a Heathrow Hotel before being reunited with their families.

No one should underestimate how difficult the tour must have been for a Lions squad made up of players who, because one northern hemisphere season ran into the other once rugby returned to play after the pandemic hiatus, have not had a break since this time last year.

But once the Boks had forced that last penalty, and Morne Steyn had supplied his touch of de javu to the climax of the series, then those thoughts disappeared. The Boks needed that win, South African rugby as a whole needed that win, South Africa as a nation needed that win.

And after a strange series, it was probably fitting that the aftermath felt strange too. It had been strange the whole way to have no-one in the stadium, but it was another level of strange seeing such a dramatic finish being enacted in such cavernous emptiness and with the precinct around the stadium afterwards probably being quieter than some South African suburbs were.

With curfew at 10pm, meaning two hours after the game ended, and no chance of going out to have a few drinks and enjoy the post-match atmosphere like we did after the decisive Loftus test in 2009, it was all rather subdued. After finishing working we had time for a maximum of two beers and then, just like that, it was all over.

THE CHOICE FACED BY UK MEDIA

The chartered flight that flew the Lions home stopped first in Dublin, where the Irish players disembarked because the Irish government have a different Covid policy to people travelling from South Africa to the UK, and the rest flew on to Jersey. But it wasn’t just the Lions players and management - Warren Gatland is currently isolating in New Zealand - who had to worry about quarantining and isolation at the end of their tour, so did the UK media.

I bumped into Robert Kitson, chief rugby writer at The Guardian, just after undergoing my obligatory pre-match Covid test and he told me it had been a quite hectic 48 hours for all the UK journalists following the tour. Not only did they have to do the hard work required in previewing the final test of a closely fought series, they also had to decide on their travel plans. I assume those were left to the last minute because they hoped something might change their government’s attitude to the need to quarantine.

The option, as Rob had put it to me earlier in the week, was to either go home and isolate at an airport near Heathrow for two weeks, or find another less direct route back into the UK which might be more palatable than being holed up in a soulless hotel room in mid-summer. He chose the latter, and will currently be sojourning in France. He told me some of the other guys were stopping off at more exotic locations.CHARGES OF BOKS BEING BORING ARE JUST SOUR GRAPES

There was an interesting article in the Irish Examiner written by former Lions flyhalf Ronan O’Gara after the final test. He wrote about the need for some of the players after such a closely fought Lions series to be offered some kind of help with their mental health. Coming from someone who was part of the narrow Lions loss here in 2009, and in fact it was he who conceded the penalty that Morne Steyn kicked to win that series, it was quite enlightening.

O’Gara wrote about how the players would be hurting and how they’d be left to fend for themselves as individuals in a different way to how it is if you lose a cup final or a league decider with the club or province you are contracted to, or with your individual nation. In those situations, the players remain relatively together and deal with the disappointment together, whereas the nature of a Lions tour, with the group made up of so many disparate parts and nationalities, makes that impossible. Once the tour is over, everyone scatters to the four winds and many don’t associate with each other again.

Hopefully, the Lions being together in Jersey might help them absorb the disappointment together this time around. Maybe it will help for them to talk about it. But when it comes to my northern hemisphere colleagues who are taking the long way home, I hope they just forget about the rugby altogether if it means it stops them whingeing about the style employed by the team that beat the side they were here to write about.

For goodness sake, there are several different ways to win a rugby match, just like supporters of Chelsea in the Jose Mourinho era will tell you, there are many different ways to win a soccer match and to win major league titles. And it is not as if the Boks were nearly as boring or conservative as the narrative suggests they were.

For the umpteenth time, for I do think I have rabbited on a bit about this, it was the Boks who scored the most spectacular tries in the series, and if you add in the times they were over the line without the try being awarded after good counter-attacks, I just can’t get the theory that the South Africans play anti-rugby. The Boks scored four tries, all through the backs, the Lions scored just two.

And neither was it true that the Lions went out to play the enterprising rugby we saw when they were up against teams that had no defence in the build-up games. It was Gatland’s Welsh kicking style that was to the fore, and while the injection of Finn Russell when Dan Biggar was injured in the final game did give us a glimpse of what might have been, the bottom line is that the Lions never scored enough tries to trouble the Boks in that final game either.

They end the series with just two tries having been scored by them, and they were both driving maul tries. So which is the boring team?

My message to all those who are bitter that their team didn’t win and now somehow consider it a salve to suggest the rugby the team that beat theirs is somehow out of line and playing the wrong kind of rugby is one that was sent to me by a Durban newspaper reader with Transvaal leanings after Natal lost a Currie Cup final to that team in 1993: “Get over your bitterness by sucking a lemon, and make sure you suck it hard!”

I’d be the first to agree that the Boks do need to grow their game, but you are crackers if you expected them to grow their game in the 21 months they didn’t play after winning the World Cup final. You have to play to grow. That’s stating the obvious, but some people seem to miss that.

The imperative in this series given what was on the line, and given the long period of international activity, was the same as the World Cup final. They just had to win it. That they did was a considerable achievement.