THE JOY OF BEING ON TOUR
Being on the road has been like reliving old times. Cape Town on Friday for the Stormers game. Durban on Tuesday for the game between the All Blacks and Sharks. And then onward to Pretoria, and a completely different vibe as the Bulls took their turn to pack down against the tourists.
So yes, the tour concept has been revived for those of us who are following it, and that was one of the aims of the people who first dreamed up the idea of the Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry tour. “Let’s bring back the old fashioned tour” has long been the cry from those of us who experienced and remember the concept.
Of course it’s not quite like the days of yore - when following the French team around the country in 1993, we were in East London one day for the game between the tourists and SA A, and then the next we were at Skukuza after flying via Joburg.
My fear of flying was less acute in those days - the plane that took us from Joburg to the Kruger National Park wasn’t much bigger than a microlight, but I can’t remember it bothering me.
It was the days before email and mobile phones and the one little challenge was getting our stories out of the Kruger. For that, us traveling hacks would go to the little public phone at the gate to the Skukuza camp, which I doubt is still there, and dictate our stories to eager typists.
Sometimes we queued to use that phone, and I can remember helping a colleague who should remain unnamed but for some bizarre reason felt that his readers would want to know what animals the French players had seen on their excursion in the park.
He ran out of ideas so I helped him improvise, mouthing words like hippo, leopard and the like to him and then also throwing in a curve ball just to see how he’d react - elk. He knew enough about the game species to know that one wasn’t real, and neither was moose. I think I’d make an interesting safari guide.
On that tour we travelled from Kruger to Bloemfontein for the next game and the schedule was the root of one of my more embarrassing radio movements.
In addition to my day job as the SA Morning Group’s man on tour, I was reporting on the tour for 702 and Gary Bailey was still running the sport there. I did a nightly crossing with Gary and while in Skukuza we spoke over that tickey-box phone about how poor the French had been in being defeated by an SA A team coached by the newly appointed Springbok coach Ian McIntosh in East London a few days before that.
The natural thing for him to ask me as we neared the end of the conversation was “So where to now for the French?”
Meaning obviously how were they going to recover from the defeat and where did the loss leave them. Unfortunately I took the question way too literally and responded “They’re going to Bloemfontein”. Dumbo!
I LIKE KIMBERLEY BUT KIMBERLEY DIDN’T LIKE ME
The All Blacks aren’t going to Bloemfontein, East London or for that matter Kimberley, one of my favourite spots for rugby although also one of the scariest. That happened in 1996, when let’s just say I wasn’t the then Bok coach Andre Markgraaff’s biggest supporters - and he knew it as did his real supporters.
It also just so happened that the local newspaper in Kimberley, The Diamond Fields Advertiser, was part of the Independent Group, for whom I was then writing, so the Kimberley people who loved Markgraaff, for that is where he was from, didn’t take kindly to my daily bile.
After Griquas, who Markgraaff had helped prepare for the game, managed to draw with the All Blacks, some big dudes in the car park who saw my laptop drew me into their circle and asked me who I was. Before I could answer they asked me if I was one of the “veraaiers” (traitors). I was in fact the main traitor. Needless to say I beat a very hasty retreat.
On Markgraaff - when years later I featured him in my book on the Bok coaches, “The Poisoned Chalice”, I realised that I might have misunderstood some of the things he was trying to do, and didn’t take enough account of the strange time SA rugby was going through as the first year of professionalism also coincided with the massive salaries awarded to the 1995 World Cup winning Boks, several of whom were no longer good enough to make Markgraaff’s team.
But anyway, back to the present, this tour features only the big cities, and most of it happens in Gauteng, where I am now, something that isn’t completely agreeable to the Kiwi media people who missed out on what could have been some good days on the beach in Durban because of the miserable weather there for most of their stay.
They don’t help themselves by staying in the central part of Sandton. They should try a suburb like Linden, where I am now. There’s a Loerie, no not the Knysna version but one of the grey ones, now apparently officially called the grey go away bird you get up here, watching me from a tree as I write this.
FORGET ABOUT THE OLD FASHIONED TOUR
Okay, now that I have spoken about the fun of being on tour, let me get to the point - this really isn’t an old fashioned tour. And not just because this tour is missing out on the Eastern Cape, central South Africa and the lowveld. The old fashioned tours were enjoyable because tour games had more meaning when they featured teams that had current Springboks in them.
I keep humouring people who want to be all analytical about how the local sides have played so far, particularly in Durban, where frankly the result was entirely predictable given the team that was selected.
This isn’t a time to be over-analytical because the teams are in pre-season and, unlike in 1976, when both the provincial teams that were the predecessors of the Stormers and Bulls, in other words Western Province and Northern Transvaal, beat the All Blacks, they don’t feature the top Springboks.
The organisers of future Greatest Rivalry tours need to rethink, and decide whether it really is going to be an old fashioned tour, in which case the host country should be obliged to make the national players available to the club/franchise teams (franchise in New Zealand), or whether it is going to be something else.
By “something else” I am suggesting that more invitational teams get to play, and places like Kimberley and other areas that don’t get to host international rugby, play host. Griquas are at least in season because they play in the Currie Cup and would not have had an excuse had they hosted the All Blacks.
Right now there is a lot of antipathy towards the tour, or at least the tour game part of it, as I picked up at my old haunt, the Northwood Crusaders Sports Club in Durban North, when I popped in there on Friday night. “Never again am I paying that kind of money for that cxxx!” That was a standard statement that summed up the mood.
And it is a fair point - if you are going to be fielding B or C teams against the All Blacks it is an insult to both the tourists themselves and to the people being asked to fork out a lot more than they would do when they go to watch the Sharks play a regular season game.
Add onto that the fact that the professional clubs don’t get a fair cut of the gate, and are therefore not motivated to market the game and put extra effort into ensuring the team is ready by maybe staging a warmup game, and it is all a recipe for failure.
ATMOSPHERE AT LOFTUS WAS GREAT
Having said that, and you will note I am studiously ignoring in what I say next the underwhelming feeling I had when watching the opposed practice session that was the Kings Park game, the atmosphere at both DHL Stadium and Loftus was great. And both experiences were very different.
The Bulls fell short of the expectations of some of their supporters, but the stadium had a good vibe, and visitors who were new to the experience of being there would have noted the difference to the one in Cape Town.
I am struggling to explain the difference, but what I will say is this - there was a time, back when I worked for The Argus and travelled to every WP game, when I loved walking into the old Free State Stadium or Loftus and heard the strands of a Leon Shuster or even Steve Hofmeyer song on arrival, and the smell of boerewors cooking and braai smoke under a clear blue African sky.
In particular there was a Shuster number that sounded like it went “Hier kom die manne van die Argus…” I am not sure what the real word there is, but it always, as the late commentator Chic Henderson would have said, put me right for the game.
SA PLAYERS ENJOY FACING THE HAKA
One of the big positives about the tour concept is that it gives a lot of rank and file professional club players the chance to do something that they wouldn’t otherwise do - sing the national anthem and face the New Zealand haka.
I am myself a bit unsure of the relevance of the haka these days when instead of lining up with their opponents in direct opposition and just metres away, the All Blacks instead look onto a line of photographers with the opposition players a long way behind that line.
Like water breaks in the FIFA World Cup, it feels like it has become too much part of the commercial imperative. It is always great theatre though, and sport needs theatre.
In some parts of the world players and spectators alike have an anathema to the haka, and I do expect the Ellis Park crowd, as is the trend at that venue, to drown out the haka with ‘ole, ole, ole’, but there has been respect for it at other venues and generally South African players consider it a privilege to face the haka. And they use it for their own motivation.
When I interviewed him for a book a few years ago, former Springbok AJ Venter spoke about how facing the Haka was a highlight of his career, and how when in one of the Bok teams he played for against New Zealand held a meeting aimed at finding a way to face the haka down in a less traditional way, he was vehemently opposed to the suggestion that the players turn their backs on it.
He wanted the experience of looking the All Blacks in their eyes. That’s the South African way.
DIFFERENCE MADE BY TWO BOKS AND PAUL DE WET
The Bulls looked a lot more stable once their two current Boks, Elrigh Louw and Johan Grobbelaar, came on at Loftus. Which of course gives you pause to think of how this tour might have gone had the local teams been allowed to field all their Boks.
I also thought that the one Bok who had been dropped back from the national squad to the Bulls, Embrose Papier, might have been a bit too individualistic in his attempt to play his way back into national reckoning. Paul de Wet somehow just seemed to inject more pace into the Bulls game when he came on and that contributed to what had been a toothless attack in the first half growing fangs in the second.
The try that Stravino Jacobs rounded off was a beaut and while contestable kicking has to be an obvious part of the Bok strategy in the series that kicks off at Ellis Park on Saturday, just because the All Blacks are so poor at dealing with it, I do agree with Johan Ackermann that the hosts can hurt the All Blacks with ball in hand too.
Indeed, the misguided Kiwi spin that couches South African rugby players and coaches as people who are anti rugby and just want to slow the ball and games down, something that is no doubt geared towards influencing the match officials, could well be exposed for the hot air that it undeniably is once the series kicks off.