TIME TO HIT THE ROAD
It’s here. The Springbok season kicks off at the weekend with the game against the Barbarians and from a personal viewpoint there can be no better starting point than the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium and Gqeberha.
It’s an easy drive up from Cape Town through the Overberg region, the Garden Route and past the city of George, which Heyneke Meyer once told me he wanted to turn into the Bath of South African rugby and now that he’s back there maybe he still will.
Then there’s Knysna, Plett, the Tsitsikamma forest and beyond that past J Bay. Most of the drive is scenic and features plenty of points of interest.
Of course last year I didn’t have to go anywhere as that Barbarians game was in Cape Town, but apart from the inclement weather that made that week trying for everyone, and I won’t forget the mush that passed for the sea the Barbarians had to look onto from their hotel in Camps Bay, it is nice to start the international season on the road.
Which there will be quite a bit of during the home season, for the PE game (I’ve already referred to it as Gqeberha but coming up with GQ or GH as a shortened form would leave everyone confused) is the prelude to what will be quite a frenetic period of activity.
It starts in Johannesburg and the England game, which will be the focus two weeks hence as both teams play their first ever Nations Championship games.
After that it’s Scotland in Pretoria and Wales in Durban, the Boks then travel for a warmup game against Argentina ahead of a Greatest Rivalry Tour which may in part make up for us missing out on the proper buzz of a British and Irish Lions tour because of Covid in 2021.
THAT LIONS TOUR TRANSCENDED SPORT IN A NEGATIVE WAY
There’s nothing really positive to remember about the 2021 edition of the iconic history rivalry between the Boks and the British and Irish composite team except for the fact that South Africa won it with Morne Steyn’s late penalty.
I was one of the few at every test match on that tour but only because all the games were played in Cape Town.
There were no fans and it did feel like the absence of proper atmosphere contributed to the series becoming way too serious and angst ridden, kind of transcending sport but in a negative way.
I am convinced that the cabin fever that must have enveloped both squads as they went into their Covid bubbles was responsible for the rancour that still lingers around that series five years later.
A SERIES DECIDER AT A NEUTRAL VENUE UNDERMINES IT
Obviously all South Africans will be hoping the Boks win, and will be unhappy if they don’t, but the All Black tour that takes in Cape Town at the start before going to Durban for the Sharks game, then to Joburg and Pretoria for a few games, including the first test, before returning to Cape Town for the second test and then back to Gauteng for the third test at the FNB Stadium should be a lot of fun.
And very intense too, as all battles between the Boks and All Blacks are. My only regret is that there will be a fourth game in the USA.
I understand the money aspect, but an exhibition game could have been played at another time and not part of a series which should really be about New Zealand bidding to emulate Sean Fitzpatrick’s team of 1996 by conquering the Boks in South Africa.
If it is 2-1 to New Zealand heading to Baltimore surely then they have won a series in South Africa. Having a decider at a neutral venue at the end of four weeks of frenetic action on South African soil is frankly ridiculous and if we do the converse of that scenario I’ve just sketched, and they go to America having drawn one game and won one apiece to make it 1-all, the All Blacks won’t be able to say they won a series in South Africa if they win the decider. Because they wouldn’t have.
For if Baltimore was in South Africa I would have driven there or bussed there by now… Playing that final game in the USA undermines a great concept. When it was first mooted it was described as The Ashes of rugby, and it is. Imagine what it would do to the integrity of next year’s Ashes series scheduled for England if the deciding game was played not at a venue like The Oval but in New York.
ITOJE’S REST MAY BE TIP OF ICEBERG
England’s intention to rest their skipper Maro Itoje from their forthcoming away leg of the Nations Championship, and it is officially an away leg for them even though they play one game in a place called Liverpool, which I think is in England, may become a trend in a competition I am not sure everyone will take seriously.
Itoje is almost certain to miss the trip to South Africa for the 4 July game in Johannesburg because it feels he needs a chance to recharge, and it is likely that the fuss being made in New Zealand about the imminent visit of France will again be dulled by the Six Nations sending an understrength team.
Their scheduled Nations Championship game is just too close to their Top 14 final, as in one week, and the French rugby bosses do quite rightly place a high premium on their domestic competition. The clubs are very strong in that country, and not just on the field, in the rugby eco system too.
In introducing the Nations Cup to give meaning to the “friendlies” played in the July and November windows, rugby is once again following soccer, who have the Nations Cup. If anyone was paying attention they might have noted that the soccer competition doesn’t really generate that much excitement, with games still often viewed effectively as friendlies.
And my money says that while Rassie Erasmus will take the home games serious as they kick off the new season and serve as a buildup to what is to follow, he may well rest players when the Boks go to Ireland, France and Italy later this year with the following World Cup, just 10 months later, in mind.
WHO’D ENVY RAZOR THIS WEEK
There’s something a bit bizarre about Scott ‘Razor’ Robinson coaching the Barbarians this week. He felt honoured to get the call, but I can’t remember a previous occasion where a recently sacked national coach finds himself heading the fun environment that the Barbarians are all about.
Given that he was supposed to be coming back to this city later in the year for something far more serious, and he’d be forgiven if he had viewed being the New Zealand coach on the Greatest Rivalry Tour as a certainty given that sacking an All Black coach in mid-term is unprecedented in the modern era, it’d be understandable if he finds being in Cape Town a bit depressing.
Having written John Mitchell’s book with him, I know full well just how badly being sacked as All Black coach can impact a person. Mitch told me that after parting ways with the All Blacks, and being made public enemy No 1 in New Zealand after his team was knocked out by Australia in the 2003 World Cup semifinal, he went through a harrowing period that was only relieved in October 2007.
That was when the All Blacks got dumped at the quarterfinal phase of their next World Cup effort, going out to France in Cardiff, and Mitchell’s status as enemy No 1 was taken over by Graham Henry.
We think South Africans are ridiculously fanatical about their rugby but New Zealanders take it to a different level, and it would be completely understandable to me if Robertson felt uncomfortable answering any questions about the All Blacks while he is here, or even if he asked that no such questions were asked in press conferences.
PERSPECTIVE NEEDED IN REACTION TO BARBARIANS RESULTS
Another former All Black coach, well in his case assistant coach, was in charge of the Barbarians here last year and I felt that some of the social media treatment of Robbie Deans was idiotic. A Barbarians coach doesn’t get to work with his team with enough time to hone them into a unit that should have its performance scrutinised like it would be a nation’s pride is on the line.
The Barbarians only assemble at the start of the week, and some of the players aren’t even drafted in by Monday. From what I can gather, Oli Kebble only got his call once the week had started. And the Barbarians bring together players who usually have only played against each other rather than with each other.
Last year I was the journalist who addressed the elephant in the room with the last question directed to Sam Cane, the Barbarians captain 12 months ago, when I asked him how he was getting on with Peter O’Mahoney, the Irishman who during a Lions series insulted Cane by calling him “A cxxx Richie McCaw”.
The answer was that they’d got on okay, and frankly that is what the Barbarians is about. Steven Kitshoff, when interviewed on SuperSport about his experience at the Barbarians, described the Wallaby scrumhalf Nic White as a good oke.
Which isn’t the view of South Africans who remember his soccer style hamming after an incident involving Faf de Klerk that got De Klerk yellow carded a few years ago. But Kitshoff will know better having got to know White when they were together at the Barbarians.
Mark Andrews, that most ferocious of Boks on the field yet a level human being off it, once told me about how he’d roomed with Anton Oliver, an All Black hooker of that era. Oliver told Mark that he couldn’t understand how the Bok lock could be such a nice guy off the field and yet such “a psycho” on it.
Andrews told me separately that after his first experience of playing against the All Blacks, when he was verbally assaulted and savagely rucked by the likes of Zinzan Brooke early in the Dunedin game in the 1994 series, he resolved that he could never be friendly with them off the field. He reasoned it could erode his own determination to throw everything he had at them in what he saw as a war on the field.
The Barbarians experience, as Kitshoff told us, is all about players who are normally enemies getting to socialise together and getting to know each other. But there isn’t enough time to mould into a team so the coach can’t have his abilities judged on how the actual game that comes at the end of a relaxed week punctuated by plenty of revelry turns out.
GO THE BULLS - BUT THE WAIT HAS BEEN TOO LONG
I used the word ridiculous at least once earlier in this column. But you know what is really ridiculous? That I have got to this point of this piece without mentioning the other big game happening this week.
The night before the Barbarians game, a few of us hacks will be gathered in our favourite PE eating spot, Fernandos, to stuff ourselves with their speciality chicken (and prawns), watching the Bulls try to break their URC title duck in the Grand Final against Leinster.
Friday Lights is the way some have couched the biggest game of the URC season, and that’s maybe a good thing for the Bulls as they have a decent record against Leinster under lights, and on a Friday night. It was under lights on a Friday night that they pulled off their famous semifinal win against Leinster at the RDS Arena in 2022.
Can they do it again? As the game nears it feels like a win is becoming more likely, although that was partly because I bought into the Leinster subterfuge that started the week. I am referring to the stories about Caelan Doris and Dan Sheehan being doubtful for the match. Which they no longer are, because both of the influential Ireland players have been cleared to play and are included in the Ireland match day 23.
You can read my preview on Friday for a more detailed analysis of the task faced by the Bulls, but the reason the final has been neglected until this point of the column is because it really does feel, with the Boks playing on Saturday and the semifinals having been played nearly two weeks ago, that the URC has left town.
The decision to install a two week gap between the last play off game and the decider has a lot of merit - or it would have had if the Bulls had stayed in Ireland to prepare rather than flying home and then returning to the northern hemisphere.
If that was the way they were going to do things, then it would have made more sense to play the final last weekend. That would have helped the Bulls too as Leinster would still have been licking the physical wounds inflicted by the Stormers.
There was no clash with anything else last weekend and many of my mates actually thought the final was going to be played then. And were disappointed when informed otherwise. By the time the final is played, it would have been over a month since teams that didn’t make it into the playoffs, like the Sharks, last played a URC game. Adding in the bye week just makes the Finals Series, as it is known, feel too drawn out and too long.
‘NATAL RULES’ SHOULD BE APPLIED TO ALL ADULT TEAMS
“It’s Natal rules.” That was Hugh Reece-Edwards speaking. At the time the former Natal and Springbok fullback was one of Andre Markgraaff’s assistant Bok coaches in Argentina in late 1996.
He was talking to James Small, the late Bok wing who was arguably the first rock star of rugby, certainly South African rugby, and who had a colourful and controversial relationship with team management and with team protocols during a career that saw him at one point hold the Bok try scoring record and be South Africa’s most capped player.
Earlier that season Small had been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons following a late night that ended in the early hours of the morning. Actually, some say it ended not long before dawn. The night in question was just a few days before a Bok Tri-Nations test against New Zealand in Cape Town so maybe it was understandable that it led to a disciplinary hearing that saw him miss the series against the All Blacks that followed.
The reason I am regurgitating this history is because I thought about it, and Reece-Edwards’ conversation at a team hotel in Rosario with Small as the wing was heading out for a drink, when the Ben Stokes fiasco mentioned in this column last week hit the headlines in the UK media.
What Reece-Edwards was referring to when he spoke of “Natal rules” was the more relaxed atmosphere that Ian McIntosh presided over at the union that had just become known as the Sharks. Certainly more relaxed than the regimes at some of the other provinces at that time, and obviously under Markgraaff at the Boks in the earlier parts of 1996.
“Natal rules” was effectively leaving it to the players to be responsible and understand when was too much. For Mac, what mattered most was what the players did on the field. If there are any who might think Mac was too soft that was not true, and his record with Natal was a good one - four Currie Cup titles won under his coaching between 1990 and 1996.
Markgraaff was learning on the job and by the end of 1996, when Reece-Edwards and Nick Mallett joined his coaching team, he’d mellowed when it came to discipline and had figured out that while Small broke some of the rules he had imposed, it didn’t impact on his performances.
Given that England cricket captain Stokes’ late night drink that broke his own curfew and led to his discipline enforced omission from the current test against New Zealand being played at The Oval was after his team had won a test match and not before or during, and the next game was a full 10 days away, there should have been some levity from the England management.
If “Natal rules” was applied to England cricket there’d be less pious opprobrium from a cricketing media and public that appears to have lost all sense of perspective. Do we really want all modern top sportsmen and women to become robots without personalities?
If you say yes then imagine a world where there was never a James Small or, in a different sport, a George Best, an Eric Cantona, Jamie Vardy or Vinny Jones, or for that matter a Shane Warne.
The King, as some knew him, liked a smoke and a drink and yet no-one would ever have accused one of the greatest cricketers of all time of undermining his performance and driving people away from his sport with his behaviour…