NOT A TIME FOR FAINT HEARTS
I feel it. Do you feel it? If you are a South African with an interest in rugby and care about how the Springbok success is the one thing that these days seems to consistently work in this country and gives us our identity, surely you must.
Maybe you can throw in the Rugby World Cup, which happens every four years, if you are looking for something with more gravitas. But it won’t be by much. It feels like the Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry series against the All Blacks matters. And matters a lot. Enough to induce a kind of indescribable tension.
When my supersport.com colleague Brenden Nel said at the end of our Talking Boks podcast this week that he was very excited and couldn’t wait for Saturday to arrive, I checked him. Saturday might not be a good day for anyone with a dickey heart. Just because of how Bok/All Black fixtures flow, and what they mean.
Let’s start with that flow. I was at Northwood Crusaders in Durban North listening to live music on the eve of my flight up to Gauteng and the next day’s game between the All Blacks and Bulls at Loftus. While the singer was doing his stuff, the big screen was showing a SuperSport documentary of recent Bok/All Black games.
Maybe because the sound was off, somehow the message that came through was impossible to ignore - the Boks have a great recent record against the Kiwis, and the narrative is one of South Africa being the dominant team. There’s been just the one loss - at Eden Park last year. Otherwise you have to go back to the game at Mount Smart, also in Auckland, for the previous defeat, and that was a few months out from the 2023 World Cup.
Since that World Cup, and the nail-biting one point win in the final, the Boks have been recognised as the bosses of rugby. But outside of the 43-10 win in Wellington, and even in that game the Boks trailed at halftime, the triumphs have all been close affairs, and invariably the All Blacks have got off to a good start and the Boks have had to claw their way back.
Like the last game between these teams here in Johannesburg in 2024. There were times when the All Blacks were more than a score ahead. And I can remember how stressful everything felt in the Ellis Park stadium as the Boks clawed back with two late tries to win 29-27. Or rather I should say the images on the big screen at Crusaders reminded me.
A week later it was also tight. The Boks won 18-12 in Cape Town, but were behind for parts of that game. It seldom comes easy. And yet it feels there is so much riding on this contest. As there should be - it’s why the RGR series was created.
The two traditional powerhouses of rugby squaring up every four years. It is like cricket’s Ashes series. Although England and Australia aren’t always the best two teams in the world when the Ashes series arrive, in fact they often aren’t, it matters to the English and Australia. This is going to matter a lot.
BECOMING THE HUNTED
Fortunately, at least from a South African viewpoint, the Boks are too ingrained in what Rassie Erasmus expects them to do, and the systems he has set up, for them to feel like this. But part of the reason there’s this tightening tension building as game day approaches is because there’s been a shift in the dynamic between the two nations.
There was a time many South Africans probably felt the All Black games were a free hit. A chance to make a statement against the best team in the world. There’s always been respect between the two nations. Allow me to admit when the Boks and New Zealand met in the last World Cup final I didn’t feel there was quite as much tension in the air as there was when the Boks met England in Yokohoma in the 2019 final.
Apologies to anyone of an English persuasion, but losing to England from a SA rugby perspective always just feels completely idiotic. Like something that shouldn’t happen. England went into that final in 2019 as favourites, at least in their own minds, because they beat New Zealand in the semifinal, but somehow it just didn’t feel like they belonged there. And the game proved it.
With the All Blacks as the final opponents it was different. Yes, all South Africans want their team to beat the All Blacks, and there is a desperation for them to do it. But there’s a deep respect, even at this time when the temperatures have been raised by a war of words off the field, for the All Blacks.
And although the Bok aura was in grave danger of disappearing a decade ago when the All Blacks won 57-15 at Kings Park, order has been restored and I am pretty sure that the respect is reciprocated from the Land of the Long White Cloud. I am pretty sure I am not the only South African who has the view that if the Boks aren’t going to win the World Cup, then let the Kiwis win it. For it fits.
There’s something different now though that is forcing the tightening of chests. The next four weeks is not a free hit. The Boks are the double world champions. They are a settled team and they are seen as the dominant force. On that basis they must be seen as favourites. Which also means the hunter has now become the hunted.
And there it is - if after Baltimore the All Blacks have edged the series, then it will feel like a bubble has burst. For winning has become the South African expectation of the Boks. Yes, it is very different this time. For it’s huge for the All Blacks too.
As I have written elsewhere, much of the off-field attempt at Kiwi persuasion of the match officials has been directed by their perceived role in saving the game in their country from the ambitions of the League code.
ELIMINATION OF TIE-BREAKER POSSIBILITY WAS SANITY PREVAILING
I was at SAB African depot for the unveiling of the trophy that will be played for in this series and every four years henceforth. I am not in the business of taking photos to use in my column, but trust most have seen it. I like it for its uniqueness. It’s not just a tired old cup. Actually, in the same way that the Ashes prize - in that case it’s an urn - isn’t.
But the best angle to come out of the function, which saw former Springbok captain Gary Teichmann and former All Black captain Sean Fitzpatrick bring the trophy up onto the stage, was something that SARU president Mark Alexander confirmed in his speech. There will be no tie-breaker in Baltimore if after four test matches the teams, as they may well be, are deadlocked at 2-all.
That would have been ridiculous. As ridiculous in fact as the fact the potential deciding game is being played in the USA. Yes, there will be a lot of money made for the two nations in that game, which apparently will earn twice as much in one game as two games played in South Africa, but an All Black/Bok game on USA soil could have been a stand alone at a different time, such as the fairly frequent All Black/Ireland games over there are.
It did not have to be in this series and several people spoken to at the function appeared to have the same view - whoever is ahead when the final whistle blows at Soccer City on 5 September will be seen as the winner of the series.
However, if it is level after Baltimore, the official line will be that the series is shared. And the two teams will each claim half the trophy, which if you’ve read the press releases you will know is formed from two separate parts - one created in New Zealand and the other in South Africa.
That is better than having a cosmetic way of breaking the tie, such as penalty kicks. As Alexander said, this is not a competition, it’s a series.
I assume that when there is a winner, that winner will be seen as the team that the opponent needs to dispossess of the trophy in the next RGR series. Again, much like The Ashes. Australia didn’t win in England in 2023. The series ended 2-all. But Australia retained the Ashes because they went in as the holders.
“ULI IS GOING TO KILL YOU”
Sean Fitzpatrick, who looks back at the 1996 series win, the first ever by the All Blacks in South Africa, as a career highlight, spoke about how coming here for the first Bok post-isolation game in 1992 was the fulfilment of a dream that he didn’t ever imagine being able to fulfil because of this country’s isolation.
He remembered waking up in the early hours as a kid to watch the 1976 series, and obviously he would have watched the 1981 series in New Zealand and possibly the 1986 unofficial Cavaliers series in South Africa too because he spoke about Danie Gerber being one of his early rugby heroes.
Gerber, the legendary Bok centre, played in the 1981 series and against the Cavaliers and played his final game against the All Blacks when Fitzpatrick led them at Ellis Park in the 1992 game.
Fitzpatrick knew of Uli Schmidt, the Springbok hooker who was such a star in the win over the Cavaliers, and enjoyed the privilege of facing him at Ellis Park too. But Uli was also the indirect focus of a little story that Fitzpatrick told us about what he remembered of his team’s arrival in Johannesburg.
It was a Sunday night and thousands thronged the airport terminal. My own memory is of huge posters, pretty much proclaiming the South African rugby public’s arrogance at the time - “Welcome to your worst nightmare”. That was the welcoming line to the All Blacks.
It didn’t turn out that way for Fitzpatrick’s All Blacks, they won the the test match, but what he remembers about that welcoming event at the airport was a poster that was shown to him by a very young child as he sat on the bus that was to take the squad to their hotel: “Uli is going to kill you!”.
KIWIS MAY BE THE ONES WHO ARE TOO INSULAR NOW
I remember that period Fitzpatrick was referring to well. The All Blacks weren’t just here for the one game, it was a mini-tour that started in Durban, and their game against Natal was the one that officially broke South African rugby’s isolation because of apartheid - the country was on the path to becoming a democracy by then which was why the sanctions were lifted.
That game against Natal was the first All Black game I ever covered as a journalist and it is embarrassing now to think of how ignorant all of us South Africans were because of the insularity that was bred by our sporting isolation. I genuinely believed, like many of my countrymen did, that our Currie Cup was so strong that it made up for our lack of international competition.
That theory was fuelled by someone like former All Black lock Murray Pearce never really breaking into Ian McIntosh’s Natal team in the years he played for College Rovers. On the eve of the Natal game I phoned Michael du Plessis, who’d captained the last Bok team to be selected, which was for an exhibition game against SA B the year before, at his dental practice in Port Elizabeth to ask him how he thought Natal would fair.
Michael had by then retired from international rugby but he had forthright views, and he was convinced South Africa had left the rest of the world behind.
“Natal will win by 20 points,” said Du Plessis.
It turned out that the All Blacks won by almost exactly the same score, and while there were some positive signs from Natal, and I distinctly remember the late Piet Strydom, busy with his Afrikaans radio commentary not far away from where I was sitting in the press box, ending by saying “Suid Afrika kan moed skep” (SA can take heart), I was no longer convinced of SA’s superiority. And the test matches against the All Blacks and Wallabies in consecutive weeks underlined how far this country’s rugby had slipped in the years of isolation.
Insularity can create a mirage, and while the next few weeks will be the proof of the pudding, I do have a theory that it is now the Kiwis who are insular. There were posts on social media after Hurricanes won Super Rugby proclaiming that they were the best club team in the world and would beat the Springboks.
That’s quite a claim and having watched the closing stages of Super Rugby, where defences are passive and there is too much of a commitment to entertainment (because of the threat from League), and the knock-outs of the Champions Cup, in my mind there’s a clear winner. It is the competition that is staged north of the equator.
All aspects of rugby are tested in what is effectively the European Cup, and it is much closer to test rugby than Super Rugby is. Super Rugby lost something when the South African teams were expelled from the competition. As I say, time will tell. And that ‘time’ starts on Saturday. Buckle those seatbelts.
TEICHMANN REMINDS ME OF WHAT HAS CHANGED
Seeing Gary Teichmann at the trophy unveiling reminded me of the context of that solitary Bok series defeat to the All Blacks on South African soil. It was one of those periods, of which there were many in the post-isolation era, where the Boks shot themselves in the feet.
It will be one of my subjects of my next Striking It Rich, and I will go into more detail there, but that series was played to the backdrop of constant off field distraction for the host team - the injury - or was it an injury - to Francois Pienaar, the suspension handed to the regular Bok wing James Small for breaking a curfew, Os du Randt being “gatvol”, the pressure brought to bear on team manager Morne du Plessis for asking fans not to wave the old apartheid era flag at matches… There were so many, not least of them the behind the scenes haggling over money.
As I say, you can read about that next week, but it should suffice to say now, on the eve of the kick-off to this momentous series, and I touch wood in saying this for you never know what could go wrong, but this time around Rassie is heading a singularly focused team that has no distractions to deal with and, but for pockets of All Black supporters in the Cape, has a united nation behind them.