Somewhere between the Karoo and the clear blue sea, which on this day was shrouded in grey clouds, at an altitude of 35 000 feet and while the Boeing 737-800 was encountering what the pilot had told us would be mild bumps, my brain started whirring.
Well whirring might be a relative concept in this instance. A mate had described the weather I was going to encounter in Durban as “intense” and “grim”. When I asked him if my landing would be bumpy, his response was “If you are allowed to land here”. Wow, with friends like that who would need enemies. He knows full well I have what he thinks is an illogical phobia about flying, and in particular that thing called turbulence.
By the way, while on this subject, the expert I consult on when it comes to a few things these days, Doctor Alan Inglewood, which is my pseudonym for AI, told me that people who have a fear of flying are usually highly intelligent people. Dinkum. Check it out for yourself.
So let’s proceed - this highly intelligent person didn’t care much for the light bumps because his Durban friend’s alarmist talk had prompted him to take not just a small fraction of a dormicum tablet, as he normally would for a domestic flight, but the whole thing. And it wasn’t a bad decision at all - journalist colleague Mark Keohane told me after landing that it was a very bumpy flight.
Which I was sort of aware of, but didn’t care. The tablet didn’t put me to sleep, but it relaxed me, and somewhere in the air space between Cape Town and Durban I did something I haven’t done in a sod of a long time - I purchased a beer. With alcohol in it. That qualification is the pivotal bit. Yes, 14 weeks of tee-total was broken, but the thoughts that whirred were very lucid ones.
And being a highly intelligent person (I must be if I am scared of flying) they whirred towards an oddity of air travel. Feet. We were told we were 35 000 feet above sea level. Why feet? The metric system apparently first started breathing in 1776 (see how bright I am) and yet the airline industry, which is a relatively recent introduction to the universe, refers to feet. And they expect me to be confident in their ability to keep me safe?
Anyway, before this becomes a very long story that should have been cut short but wasn’t, thinking of feet as opposed to metres - and there are around 10 000 of those metres separating you from the ground if you are at 35 000 feet - started making me think of time warps. If the airline industry is in one, then so might the New Zealand rugby media and rugby industry. Which is a good time to insert a new sub-heading and start talking about what apparently they pay me to do - rugby.
HAVE THE KIWIS BEING PAYING ATTENTION?
Okay, so what crossed through my whirring but fogged mind at that height of 10 kilometres was the Kiwi punditry reaction to the tour so far, to give it its proper name Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry tour, which will soon morph from being a tour to a series. I keep reading and hearing people over there, and those who are on tour here currently, speaking about South African rugby as if all we do is try and slow the game down and about South African players as if they are lumps of lard who just want games to be set-piece battles and nothing more than that.
Very late on Tuesday night, after the underwhelming experience that was the wet weather game between the All Blacks and the Sharks, some of us local hacks finally finished our work and started heading out of Kings Park. And gave a lift to a well known Kiwi media person who does know his oats.
Local scribe Mike Greenaway, who’d kept us waiting while he took way too long to write a follow up story to the game that could really have waited until the next morning, was the designated driver. The car was a Toyota, but not one of those tough Hilux’s that can make a drive across the Drakensberg mountain range feel comfortable (and certainly smoother than Monday’s flight). Which felt a bit unfortunate in this instance because the Kings Park outer-field we were parked on was a quagmire.
It crossed my mind that not just 4 x 4 but 4 x 4 low range would be necessary for us to get out of there, but somehow Mike got that Toyota through the mud and to a partially closed gate. It was so late that the security staff had vamoosed out of there. Mike wanted me to get out of the car in the rain and open the gate but I have a theory that if you are in a motor vehicle it can get through any gap, no matter how big.
I have some friends who tell me that is illogical, but they are all comfortable flyers so therefore don’t have my intelligence and life is too short to countenance the thoughts of dim-witted people. And as it turned out, I was right - much to Mike’s surprise, the car slid through the gap.
“You see, just like Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, knifing through the gap,” I chortled.
To which our Kiwi friend piped up, “If we were Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, wouldn’t we be hoofing the ball in the air?”
Um… Actually I could just leave it at um, but let’s just say that if New Zealand expect Sacha, or for that matter Manie Libbok, or even Handre, to hoof EVERY ball in the air, then as a South African I am really looking forward to that first test on 22 August.
I capped the word ‘every’ there because of course, with the New Zealand catching ability so debatable and it is not something they get much practice at in Super Rugby, you’d have to be part of the dim-witted brigade if you didn’t hoof at least some balls in the air.
Actually, quite a lot of well directed balls in the air will be a necessary requirement, and possibly a winning one too, but if anyone thinks that, and slowing the ball down and throwing lard bums into set piece battles and mauls, is all the Boks do then that ‘anyone’ hasn’t been watching. Indeed, that same ‘anyone’ has been living in a time warp like the airline industry.
Did the Boks slow the ball down when they beat the ABs 43-10? That perception of SA rugby is now as outdated as using feet as a measurement when you measure height.
And you can just ask Jake White - when he dreamt up his sign above the Loftus tunnel that the All Blacks will run through on Saturday to play the Bulls, he was thinking in metres. Pretoria is about a kilometre and a half above sea level. Whether it matters or not to the Kiwis now that they don’t travel here twice a season like they did in the Super Rugby era we will know at the weekend.
THE OBSTACLES MADE WHAT HAPPENED IN DURBAN PREDICTABLE
Time warp as a concept is very much the focus of this column, or travel diary, which it becomes when I leave my home. Looking at the reaction to the games played so far, it feels almost like some of the Kiwi pundits took a dormicum when South Africa left Super Rugby in 2020 and haven’t been alert to what has changed in this country’s rugby since then.
For a start, while you can’t quibble with a 54-0 scoreline and eight tries on a wet night, those of us who know how the Sharks’ recruitment department has messed up over the last 13 years - basically since the day Brian van Zyl vacated the CEO’s office, and it was good bumping into him on Tuesday - would have seen the result as entirely predictable.
The Sharks aren’t the entity that Kiwis might remember from the days they were one of the more competitive of the South African teams in Super Rugby, and there’s also that other thing - the South African teams are all playing out of season. When former All Black coach John Hart gets quoted in the New Zealand media that the SA players look unfit I wonder if he’s done any homework at all. If he had, he’d know that they are unfit because they are in pre-season.
"BRANNAS" IS A PROPER FREAK
Which also by the way is why the Stormers would have wanted to slow the game down in Cape Town on the opening night of RGR. They were into their third week of the pre-season, which was why the most busy non-freak in the game from a local viewpoint was Evan Roos. He was the Stormers player involved in the most engagements, and he is also effectively still in season as he was part of the Springbok squad up until three weeks ago.
If I describe him as a non-freak of course there must be a real freak lurking somewhere in my mind. That is Deon Fourie. Sorry, but I have absolutely no idea, and I doubt Dr Alan Inglewood has either, how a guy who turns 40 next month could do what he did against the All Blacks. There really is only one word - freak.
IMAGINE IF
So okay there was a lot of criticism of a very young Sharks team that, let’s be honest, could well have lost by a similar score to what they did against the All Blacks if they’d been playing Leinster or Glasgow Warriors if those teams were in form and at full strength. Some also think I was also a bit too kind to the Stormers last Friday.
I had people Whatsapping me and giving me long analytical messages about where the Stormers had fallen down, how Hacjivah Dayimani, who was out of position on the wing, had made errors that had cost them. My response was that yes, maybe there was a missed opportunity to score a famous victory there, but when a team missing nine Boks and playing out of season plays the All Blacks any kind of analysis can be termed as over-analysis.
If there’s anyone out there who questions the depth of South African rugby on the basis of what has been produced by the clubs against the All Blacks then consider what this Stgrmers team might have done to the All Black side that struggled for 68 minutes last Friday - Warrick Gelant, Cheslin Kolbe, Ruhan Nel (captain), Damian Willemse, Seabelo Senatla, Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, Cobus Reinach, Evan Roos, Ben-Jason Dixon (or Siya Kolisi), Paul de Villiers (with Deon Fourie as impact player or vice-versa), JD Schickerling, Adre Smith, Wilco Louw (Zachary Porthen), Andre-Hugo Venter, Nthuthuko Mchunu/Vernon Matongo.
That is basically the Stormers’ full strength team now, and immediately you can see the extra depth there would be coming off the bench (Kolisi or Dixon, Porthen for Louw etc). In my opinion that team, playing together in season, would definitely have beaten the All Black team they faced last week - and by some distance. And they’d come close to emulating the 1976 Western Province team by beating the All Black first choice team too.
SHARKS SHOULD HAVE TAKEN LESSON FROM NATAL 1976 TEAM
The highlight of the Durban experience was the 103 capped former All Black Ma’a Nonu responding in kind to the challenge laid down by his countrymen in the haka. Everything after that felt like a glorified practice session, and nothing like the experience I had at Kings Park in 1976, when Natal lost 42-13 but somehow seemed more competitive than the team that played on Tuesday.
That 's understandable given that in 1976 Tommy Bedford was in his last season of a Natal career that started in 1963, Kevin ‘Tubby’ Hannaford had been around the block many times by then and the former Bok centre Ray Carlson was player/coach. In short, they were a not particularly great team but one that didn’t lack experienced hands. The Sharks team that played on Tuesday included some very talented players. But there was too little experience.
One note in passing when it comes to that 1976 game - we Natal supporters all got very excited when fullback Doc Louw scored the only Natal try, and we saw that as an achievement. And Hannaford kicked for posts every time. So there was no question of a whitewash. The Sharks’ best period in the game on Tuesday was the opening 20 minutes, when they turned down kicks for posts that would have at least ensured they weren’t whitewashed.
DOBBO INSPIRED HIS MEN
The Cape Town experience, with 47 000 people turning up to watch the All Blacks play the Stormers under the DHL Stadium lights, was a very different experience to Durban. The Stormers brought the line-speed to their defensive effort that the Sharks didn’t, they posed questions of the All Blacks that the Sharks couldn’t.
There are many different reasons one could forward for why this was the case, such as the Stormers having more experienced players in reserve than the Sharks do, but one of them is the way John Dobson inspired his players. Just like JP Pietersen and Bulls coach Johan Ackermann, he knew he was up against it, he knew the fixture fell at an awkward time.
But he didn’t let his players dwell on that. Instead he inspired them with his memories and those of the players involved in the 1976 win against the All Blacks and told them this was a one-off opportunity to make history. The players responded in kind by playing out of their skin. The other local club coaches should take note of Dobson’s method. It very nearly worked.