THE BEST PLACE FOR AN ALL BLACK TOUR OF SA TO START
The All Blacks couldn’t have asked for a better place for their first proper tour of South Africa in 30 years to start than Cape Town. As was shown at the welcome event at DHL Stadium last Friday, where the black jerseys and shirts in the stands would have made them wonder if they might be back in Christchurch, Wellington or Auckland.
As was the case back in the Super Rugby era, when their franchise teams were regular visitors and where the Crusaders in particular were popular visitors, hence the Cape Crusaders nickname given to the South African Kiwi supporters, they would have been besieged during the week at training grounds and in the hotel foyer by well wishers eager to meet and greet their heroes.
There was a Super Rugby coach back in the day who told me that after a while it actually became quite irritating, but let’s not dwell on that sample of one. Or for that matter speculate on whether the crowd of All Black supporters who live in the Cape that turned out last week for the welcome ceremony might have been a lot smaller than it would have been 10 years ago.
There are historical reasons for the All Black support among some sections of the Cape communities, but the dynamic must surely have shifted at least a bit in the years since Siya Kolisi took over as captain and the appointment of the coach, Rassie Erasmus, who properly embraced the need to walk the walk when it came to getting the entire country to support the Springboks rather than, as many of his predecessors had done, just talk the talk.
Personally, because I understand where it all started, I’ve never had a problem with the Cape Crusaders phenomenon. I well recall Deon Kayser, first capped as a Springbok in 1999, telling me that he’d been an All Black supporter only a few years before that. There are some players in the current Bok team that started life as admirers and even supporters of the All Blacks.
You support who you want to support. I am a passionate supporter of Liverpool in the round ball game, but I am not a scouser and Liverpool is the one English city I have never been to. And far from being a bad thing, it may actually be a good thing, with Deon Fourie, the Stormers stalwart and World Cup winning Bok, nailing it when he said he welcomed it if it added interest and atmosphere to the game.
‘BRANNAS’ HAS THE RIGHT ANGLE ON THE CAPE CRUSADERS
In fact Fourie’s words, and he experienced the Cape Crusaders himself early in his career, took me back to a conversation I had with the then Stormers and Western Province CEO Rob Wagner 15 years or more ago. It was after a game between the Stormers and Crusaders at Newlands where the number of people supporting the opposition became a media talking point as it was an issue to other supporters and even the Stormers themselves.
Bryan Habana was still playing for the Stormers because from memory he expressed his disappointment publicly about the animosity directed to the home team when they alighted from their bus after arriving at Newlands. And make no mistake, I shared Habana’s concern. Ugly behaviour is ugly behaviour and should never be condoned.
But what was delivered that day was a game of high tension played in a test match atmosphere. Everything was ratcheted up by the Cape Crusader presence and it added to the occasion. Apparently a lot of the Crusaders supporters actually travelled from the Eastern Cape, where there is a lot of support for the All Blacks and New Zealand teams, and it all contributed to a derby atmosphere.
A week later I was in Durban to watch the Crusaders play their next game against the Sharks. I happened to be on the Kings Park outer-field where the team buses enter the stadium precinct when the Crusaders arrived. There was no fuss made, there was none of the delirium that greeted the Crusaders arrival for the Cape Town game the week before. After what they’d experienced the week before, the Crusaders players looked almost bemused as they walked into the stadium.
And, as importantly, compared to Newlands, Kings Park had no crowd. The Sharks were doing better in those days than they are now, but the atmosphere at their home stadium didn’t come close to what greeted the Crusaders when they faced the Stormers the week before.
It was like being on a different planet, and I messaged Rob to tell him as much and that he should actually appreciate the Cape Crusaders because they were good for business. From memory, he agreed with my point. And no doubt he would have agreed with ‘Brannas’ this week too when he welcomed the local support of the All Blacks because it would swell the numbers and contribute positively to the atmosphere at Friday night’s opening tour game.
THE RUGBY BUSINESS IS THRIVING IN THE CAPE
Only Friday night will tell how much extra oomph the local support for the All Blacks might give the game between the Stormers and the tourists, but last week, when the tickets weren’t selling well, it felt like the game needed all the help it could get.
It would be a huge pity if the prices of tickets, which were not set by the Stormers, who don’t stand to gain off the gate, put the regular Cape rugby fan off going to the game. Because there can be no denying the passion for the sport in this part of the world.
Last weekend over 14 000 people turned up to watch the Stormers XXIII play against the Sharks XV. Just the names of those two teams sums up what the Carling Currie Cup has become - a development competition that is no longer contested by the top teams. And yet the game drew such a decent and appreciative crowd, as did the 11 000 capacity Boland Stadium in Wellington for the Kavaliers’ three consecutive Sunday games that started off their domestic campaign.
The support for rugby in the Cape, and the Stormers, has always been impressive compared to not only the rest of South Africa, but also overseas venues. In the Super Rugby era Newlands was consistently the most populous venue, even in the Stormers’ bad years, and that has continued into this new era where South African club teams are aligned to the northern season and leagues.
Only the European champions, Bordeaux-Begles, drew a better average attendance across the three major European professional leagues this past season. An average of over 34 000 attended Bordeaux’s games, whereas the Stormers average was over 26 000. And you have to factor in the bad timing, early afternoon kick-offs that are never popular in Cape Town, in the last few URC league games, which effectively prevented the Stormers from breaking the URC record for aggregate attendance across a season.
IT’S NOT THE FAMILIAR TERRITORY IT USED TO BE FOR THE KIWIS
Eight. That is how many separate stays that Dave Rennie has enjoyed at the hotel the All Blacks are staying in this week on Cape Town’s foreshore. He told us that at the team announcement on Wednesday as an indication of how often New Zealand teams visited Cape Town during the Super Rugby era.
He would only have been here with the Chiefs, for Australia did not visit Cape Town during his tenure with the Wallabies, and his time with Glasgow Warriors did not coincide with the URC era. The Warriors would have visited Gqeberha and Bloemfontein in his time as those were the PRO14 days, when the Southern Kings and Cheetahs were the only South African participants. So given that he hasn’t been to the city on rugby business for well over a decade, eight is a lot of visits to make, and is an indication of how familiar the Kiwis used to be with this country.
It wasn’t surprising to hear Beauden Barrett, who followed Rennie in the press conference, talk about how he missed the regular trips to South Africa that he got used to in his early days of Super Rugby, when he was playing for the Hurricanes.
“It is the off field aspects of those visits as much as the on-field experience that I miss,” he said.
Again that’s no surprise - the South African teams, even when they struggled against Kiwi opposition, who tended to dominate Super Rugby, were known for their physicality. While New Zealand teams might have left these shores triumphant, they still also left these shores physically bruised.
To my mind SA’s withdrawal from Super Rugby has played a role in the All Black decline since 2019, when they were back to back world champions and the undisputed No 1 team in the world. And it is the loss of the regular exposure to the physical approach of SA teams that has hurt them.
Conversely, the SA players may find that the tempo that the Kiwis bring to the game is now alien to them. Which is what will make the early All Black tour games interesting - with the obvious caveat being that the local players are out of season and may not be battle hardened enough and match fit.
When the Stormers run out against the All Blacks on Friday night, it will be the first Kiwi opposition they will face as a team since they lost heavily to the Blues at Newlands in late March 2020. That was the last Super Rugby game to be played in the Cape before the arrival of Covid, and the rugby landscape has undergone major change since then.
Would there be this Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry tour if New Zealanders were still such regular visitors to SA, and vice-versa? Probably not. As Rennie explained, it is the newness of some of the challenges of playing in South Africa, such as altitude when they get to Gauteng, that makes this tour such a massive attraction.
BEAUDEN IS LOOKING FORWARD TO A DRINK WITH ‘THE CHEF’
I hope the 20-year-old Stormers debutant at flyhalf, Yaqeen Ahmed, is inclined towards having a drink or two. For the All Black legend he will be in direct opposition to in Friday night’s game, Beauden Barrett, told us he is looking forward to having a drink with him after the hostilities are over.
SA not being part of Super Rugby anymore has thrown a curve ball at the All Blacks in the sense that you can sense the awkwardness of their players when it comes to discussing the players they will oppose in the tour matches against club sides. Barrett last played against SA club teams in early 2020, at which point Ahmed would have been in his early teens at Wynberg Boys High.
So it was understandable that Barrett wasn’t keen to be drawn too much when it came to ‘The Chef’, and even journalists who know him well and have followed his career over a period of time confess to not knowing why the Junior Springbok flyhalf is called that.
What he did say was that he was humbled to hear that he was the player Ahmed modelled himself on, and he clearly has seen a bit of Ahmed when analysing the Stormers for he was able to say “The Stormers are clearly in a very good place if they have both Sacha (Feinberg-Mngomezulu) and Yaqeen on their books”. Indeed.
Most clubs would pay a mint to have just one of those flyhalves, so it is going to be interesting to see how the Stormers manage to hold onto both, particularly as they also have Jurie Matthee, who was not available for the All Black game because of injury, contracted to 2029.
WHY ALL THE TALK OF ROBBIE BLAIR SCARES ME
There’s been quite a bit of retrospective this week, and understandably so. When the Stormers play the All Blacks on Friday it will be the first time they play the New Zealand national team since, playing as Western Province, they famously beat them at Newlands in 1976. The All Blacks did tour here in 1996, but they didn’t play against any of the big provinces.
What scares me about that game is how vividly I remember it and yet people keep reminding me that it was 50 years ago. On that topic, the Stormers forwards coach Rito Hlungwani, needs to be corrected - he told us during the week that Bossie Clarke had scored the winning try.
Bossie did indeed score one of the two WP tries in that game, but his was the first try. The winning try, well the one that cued Robbie Blair up to kick the winning conversion, was scored by the other wing, Chris Pope.
I wasn’t there. I was a 10-year-old going on 11 at school in Durban at the time but I remember watching the closing stages of that game on our family’s old black and white television (because I always saw them in black and white it wasn’t until I saw them play in the flesh that I became aware that the WP hoops were actually blue and not red).
I was already a voracious reader of the sports media in those days and I can remember the narrative around that game. Morne du Plessis, the WP captain, was also the Springbok captain, and he was a popular national captain too, except in Pretoria.
Thys Lourens, and I have to admit that I have always seen Lourens, who was a real hard man and an inspirational leader of his team, as the quintessential, archetypical Bull, was leading Northern Transvaal at the time and was also an experienced Bok and he had the support of sections of the northern media.
Northern Transvaal went on to beat the All Blacks later on that tour, as did Free State, who went on to claim their first ever Currie Cup title that same season, but it was that Province win that put any debate about Morne’s credentials to lead the Boks in the test series to bed. The game was played a week before the first test, so it was perfect timing.
That first test by the way was played in Durban, and old timers may remember the try scored by Gerrie Germishuys in that game because for years later it was played as the intro to one of the SABC TopSport television magazine programmes.
That feels like yesterday. Well, sort of. As does the reaction to that Blair conversion. And yet it was 50 years ago. Yikes!!