The three Rugby World Cup finals South Africa has won will stand out in memories for obvious reasons, but it has been the Springbok quarterfinal appearances that have arguably provided the most drama both on the pitch and in the aftermath.
The quarterfinal stage is the most nerve-jangling stage of the tournament for all teams. Perhaps for those that just getting there is an achievement in itself, like Fiji in 2007 and Samoa the two times they made it to the last eight in the 1990s, there’s less pressure, but for the bigger teams the quarterfinal is the marking point between the tournament being a success and a failure.
And there really is a lot to lose. When you go down in a quarterfinal, you go home on the first available flight after the game. That’s why the Bok team that lost in Wellington in 2011 was lining up to board the bus at 3am on the Monday after their Sunday evening loss to the Wallabies.
Never have I witnessed a more forlorn sight during a World Cup. The intention had been to travel to Auckland that day for the next part of the event, and a much anticipated clash with the All Blacks. Instead it was destination Johannesburg.
THE DIVIDING LINE BETWEEN SUCCESS AND FAILURE
When you win a quarterfinal, it guarantees that you will be there for the duration of the tournament. These days the bronze match is scheduled for the eve of the final. So losing a semifinal doesn’t bring an end, though when big teams like New Zealand and South Africa have lost at the semifinal stage, another game amidst that abject disappointment is probably needed like a hole in the head.
I wrote John Mitchell’s book with him (Mitch: The Real Story), and the former All Black coach he spoke in there about how he can hardly recall what happened in the bronze game he was involved in after his team was blown out by the hosts in the 2003 semifinal. South Africa won the 1999 bronze game against the All Blacks and it enabled Nick Mallett’s Boks to end the tournament on a high, but those of us who were there will remember it as a game between two teams made up of what looked like dead men walking.
Getting beyond the quarterfinal stage is an occasion for relief rather than elation for more than just the players and coaches. It can also be for fans and even for the media. In 2011 a friend was heading to New Zealand for the semifinal to support the Boks when he heard during his flight stop-over that they’d been knocked out by Australia. Not having learned his lesson, four years later he was particularly fraught watching the quarterfinal against Wales on television before flying out.
My journalist colleague Mike Greenaway was as tense in the Twickenham press box. In 2011 he had to fly home when the Boks did, and faced another early departure if the Boks lost to Wales. You are supposed to be neutral in the press box but Mike could barely contain himself when Fourie du Preez and Duane Vermeulen combined for the winning Bok try late in the game.
CHESTER’S MOMENT
That a quarterfinal is the cut-off between success and failure was brought home to me in conversation with the then South African Rugby Football Union CEO Edward Griffiths as we waited to board the plane to Cape Town, where England were playing Australia the next day, a few hours after the Boks had beaten Samoa in the 1995 quarterfinal in Johannesburg.
“This means that regardless of what happens from here, the tournament has been a success for us,” said Griffiths.
That semifinal was comfortably won, and will be remembered for Chester Williams’ four try return to the team. Williams had been excluded from the initial squad, much like Handre Pollard and Lukhanyo Am were this year, because of injury. However he’d recovered fitness in the early weeks of the tournament and Pieter Hendrikse’s suspension after the infamous Battle of Boet Erasmus against Canada gave him his gap. And he took it with open arms.
The negative for the Boks in that game was the impact of the brutal tackling of the Samoans. Indeed, an unsuspecting Joost van der Westhuizen nearly walked into a major controversy after the game when at the post match press conference at Ellis Park he lamented what he called the Samoan “coconut tackles”. He didn’t think of it as a derogatory term, but the Australian and Kiwi journalists gave him the third degree. Joost wasn’t great at speaking in English back in those early days of his career, he was much better later on, so it took some luck rather than skill to wriggle out of the situation.
NEVER LET THE FACTS SPOIL A GOOD STORY
Joost was one of the heroes of South Africa’s following appearance in a quarterfinal. Wales hosted the 1999 final, but the quarterfinal was played in Paris against England. It was a seismic occasion but also a highly significant one for the Boks, who hadn’t been great up to that point and were lambasted by their coach Nick Mallett from his perch in the coach’s box at Hamden Park in Glasgow as they played poorly in their final Pool match against Spain.
The Boks were of course the reigning champions but there was much happening around rugby back then, and Mallett had brought controversy upon himself by dropping his captain Gary Teichmann in the buildup, a mistake he has subsequently owned up to. My designation was Group Rugby Writer for the Independent Group back then, and I can recall writing a preview that was filled with doom and gloom about the consequences of defeat.
Joost, the captain at that tournament in place of Teichmann, put in some telling tackles and produced some inspiring attacking moments, but it was Jannie de Beer’s five dropped-goals that the game will be remembered for. The English heads in the stands dropped further and further with every successful kick as what was expected by many to be an English win became a quite humiliating defeat.
It was after the game that those of us who attended the press conference got to see the bad side of the UK media machine in operation. During the post match conference, De Beer attributed his ability to kick drop-goals as something given to him by God. He was obviously religious, and what he was really doing was acknowledging his deity's role in his success, as so many South African players still do.
It didn’t come out that way though in the English media the next day. Memories were evoked of Maradona’s infamous “Hand of God” comment after a World Cup soccer playoff match in 1986, and De Beer’s comments were transformed into an arrogant statement along similar lines, only in his case it was the boot and not the hand. It was never meant to mean that.
Mallett was obviously cockahoop after the performance and it relieved a lot of pressure on him. Had the Boks lost it might have been the end of him as coach, but he survived another year until he made his exit in the farcical circumstances that surrounded his supposed comments about ticket prices in Durban. Like the way De Beer’s kicking exploits were portrayed after the Paris quarterfinal, the ticket price saga, which came about due to an off-the-cuff comment in conversation and wasn’t part of a press conference, wasn’t one of print journalism’s finest moments, though it was probably true that there were people out to get Nick and that story was just an excuse.
THE GRAVEYARD STAGE FOR BOK COACHES
All Black coach Graham Henry somehow survived the New Zealand quarterfinal defeat to the Les Bleus the last time the World Cup was staged in France in 2007 and he went on to guide his nation to victory when they hosted the following World Cup in 2011.
But no Bok coach has survived when the team has exited in the first play-off fixture. The first Bok coach to learn that a lost quarterfinal is the end of the road was Rudolf Straeuli in 2003. It was a time when the South African talent pool wasn’t particularly deep, and even had all the stars been aligned and everything had gone off as best it could, it was unlikely the Boks were going to challenge for the Webb Ellis trophy that year.
Straeuli though had kept excusing defeats in the year building up to that World Cup on the basis that it was preparation for the tournament and “We will show you at the World Cup.” It effectively started on a disastrous 2002 end of year tour where the Boks lost to Scotland and were hammered by France and England.
There were many controversies that dominated the World Cup year, so when the Boks were blown away by New Zealand in the quarterfinal, Straeuli’s exit was inevitable. The confirmation came a few weeks after the tournament at a SARFU meeting in Cape Town, and Straeuli left through the back door of the organisation’s then headquarters in the Sports Science’s Institute next door to Newlands.
The then CEO Rian Oberholzer, now back in a caretaker role and doing the same good job at national level that he did in resurrecting the Stormers in his role as SARU administrator, also made his exit that day and I won’t ever forget his emotional speech which started with the words “It’s been a hell of a ride, what an experience…” It had been.
FOUR MORE YEARS GUYS, FOUR MORE YEARS
As tension goes, little beats the feeling you get when the team you are following is put in a favourable position and then for a while looks like it might mess that up. That came when Fiji came back from the dead in a Sunday quarterfinal in Marseille in 2007 and made the Boks have to dig deep for what had seemed earlier to be a likely comfortable victory.
Jake White had of course replaced Straeuli as coach and the cycle of players in the next four years was better as youngsters who’d excelled for that coach at national age group level started to come through.
But although they’d hammered champions England in the Pool stages of the 2007 tournament in France, the Boks weren’t really favourites to win the trophy - until New Zealand blew it in their fateful quarterfinal against France in Cardiff.
That quarterfinal was the night before the Boks played Fiji, and with Australia having been knocked out by England that same day in Marseille, the tournament was suddenly South Africa’s to lose. Some of us media folk were staying on the harbour front in Marseille, and that Saturday night, after watching the England win at the Stade Velodrome and with a concert playing out in front of our hotel, I let emotions get the better of me when on a television screen we saw the New Zealand fate confirmed.
“Four more years guys, four more years”, I chanted as I strutted through the harbour precinct, in so doing repeating the words that Wallaby skipper George Gregan had chided the 2003 All Blacks with in the closing minutes of the 2003 semifinal.
BRENDEN THE BASSETT
Then came the most emotional quarterfinal I was ever at during a World Cup. The Boks were expected to beat an injury ravaged Wallaby team at the Westpac Stadium, but referee Bryce Lawrence froze on his big night and let the Australians, and that outstanding ball scavenger David Pocock in particular, do their own thing with all the laws at the breakdown apparently suspended in favour of a free-for-all.
The Boks would still have won had it not been for a mistake that gave away a penalty shortly before the end, but there was no denying Lawrence’s role in evening up the battle. What looked a perfectly good Bok try that would have put them out of sight was disallowed too, so there was good reason for there to be much rancour from the beaten team.
To their credit though, coach Peter de Villiers and captain John Smit didn’t focus on Lawrence as much as they could have at a post-match press conference where tears flowed. It was the end of the journey for Smit, and De Villiers announced at the conference that it was the end of his journey too, though he changed his mind later.
In truth, it didn’t matter what Div wanted, his bosses wanted him out by then, but he would probably have survived to start the next four year cycle had his team gone all the way to the trophy. And they might have done too had they got past Lawrence and the Wallabies, for the All Blacks were impacted by injury and would have struggled to beat the South Africans in a semifinal, and the French team that played in the final was a poor one.
The bitterness of seeing our home nation defeated was exacerbated by those of us who, on the stairwell down to the press conference, overheard two Aussie journalists in conversation.
“I can’t believe it, that was really such a special moment, watching the faces of those Japies when they got beaten,” said one of them, a well known former Wallaby who I won’t mention by name.
My colleague Brenden Nel and I had shared a self catering apartment in Wellington for the first month and a bit of that tournament and we really enjoyed our time in the city. But Brenden took the Bok exit particularly badly and no sooner had the press conference been concluded and our stories filed than he was begging me to join him in packing up and leaving the city there and then.
We had to go to Auckland for the next part of the tournament, we weren’t leaving like the Boks were, but he wanted to do it right away, as in drive through the night.
“I just want to get out of Dodge City,” he wailed when I told him he was being silly.
We eventually drove the next morning, and the truth in that old saying that owners and their dogs can end up looking like each other was brought home to me. Brenden’s dogs are bassets, that breed that can look particularly sad because of their droopy eyes, and there were times on that drive to Auckland where it felt like I was sitting next to a basset.
A RESURRECTION OVERLOOKED
Four years later came that narrow win over Wales that was mentioned earlier. Wales were good at that World Cup in England, and it was their performance against the hosts at Twickenham that effectively ensured that England didn’t get out of the group phase at their own World Cup.
The Boks of course had suffered the ignominy of losing to Japan in their opening game in Brighton, so although the Welsh were feeling the effects of their tough games - they’d been in that tournament’s so-called pool of death along with the Aussies and England - it was a 50/50 call from the start.
The narrow win saw the Boks go to a semifinal, where they lost by just two points to New Zealand, before they went on to comfortably win the Bronze Playoff against Argentina at the London Stadium for a third placed finish.
Fourie du Preez had taken over as captain after the initial captain Jean de Villiers had returned home injured, and he later told me that he was disappointed that more wasn’t made of the way his team had dug themselves out of the big hole they’d been in after Brighton. And maybe he was right, for a third placed finish wasn’t bad after the laughing stock the Boks became after their unexpected loss to Japan.
Certainly it is hard to remember the Boks ever being in quite the degree of crisis they were in when I arrived belatedly at that World Cup, which was in the week of the second game against Samoa in Birmingham.
My mom had died unexpectedly on the eve of departure, hence my delay, and when the coach Heyneke Meyer greeted me by saying how sorry he was, I thought he was referring to my bereavement. He wasn’t, he was apologising for the Bok performance, something he was still doing to all and sundry even after the third place finish.
Japan in 2019 saw the Boks playing the hosts, with the Brave Blossoms having surprisingly topped their Pool after good wins over Ireland and Scotland. The tension of the quarterfinal stage was definitely felt in the early stages of that game, and the Boks only led 6-3 at the break, but the power of their forwards, and who will forget one long driving maul in particular, was always going to tell in the end as the Boks eked out a comfortable win that didn’t conform to the drama we have seen in so many of the other RWC quarterfinals they’ve played in over the last 28 years.