As part of looking back to the epic British and Irish Lions tour, we take a ride back in time for part two of Gavin Rich's tour diary during the strangest of tours, to see it through his eyes.
UK MEDIA ARE NOT AN AMORPHOUS BLOB OF SAMENESS
If I paid attention to the perceptions of some of my fellow countrymen and women as expressed in all forms of media, social or otherwise, I should be venturing to Cape Town Stadium on Saturday with a feeling of considerable nervousness and trepidation.
For if popular belief is correct, there’s a frightening and brutal gang that might arrive at the venue at roughly the same time as I do and if that is the case, it might not be a pretty outcome.
Riding 12 abreast, with sawn-off shotguns being brandished menacingly and astride Harley Davidsons, they could well be a more formidable prospect than the Springbok team the Lions that they write about will face.
There is a growing perception in the former colonies that if you stage a Lions tour you must expect the travelling media gang to arrive with their 12-bore shot-guns ready to bury everything that stands in its path under a volley of furious invective. Out of tranquillity, they will create volatility and controversy. Their impact on the opposition will be every bit as devastating as the impact would be on my own self were they to fit their billing as the biggest thugs since Anthony Falconetti (google it if you too young to know who that is).
Reality though is far from the perception that is created. For a start, while they like drinking together and eating together in countries that don’t lock down those activities, they’re not united enough to be a gang. They work in a highly competitive environment and their bosses would frown on them if they allowed themselves to be driven by what Warren Gatland wants and not what the market wants.
Yes, that can sometimes be the same thing. They’re from the same or similar part of the world, and therefore just like the South African media, they have a certain audience they write for. But the South African, or Kiwi or Aussie perception for that matter, that they shouldn’t write for that audience by focusing on the team that audience supports doesn’t make sense.
The phrase “certain audience” also needs to be qualified - the tabloid writer looking for sensation and incendiary quotes is very different from the broadsheet writer who specialises in rugby insight and think pieces. And their audiences are very different too.
CARING ABOUT RUGBY
I thought about all of the above when invited by Jon Harrison of the False Bay Rugby Club to join some of the English scribes at a small, Covid friendly get-together in midweek. It was the sort of evening that at this stage of a tour in normal times you might be keen to avoid. Not because a rugby get-together it is a bad thing, for it is the opposite, but you know that saying about too much of a good thing? In normal times that applies to evenings where you are on tour and are for the umpteenth time invited to a place where you talk about rugby and nothing but rugby and finally go through that threshold point when beer starts sagging your belly.
These aren’t normal times though, and beer hasn’t exactly been plentiful during the times of Covid, so it was a great oasis in the desert amidst the isolation that, as I wrote in a piece on Thursday, is helping to raise the incendiary temperatures that describe the mood of this tour.
Of course, having been on the beat since before rugby turned professional, and having done several tours and World Cups starting with the first Bok post-isolation tour of France and the UK back in 1992, I know some of the visiting media better than some of my contemporaries might.
Some of the old stagers from that very first tour are still around, others were here on the 1997 Lions tour.
But let’s not turn this into a long digression about how rugby writers aren’t different from other folk in the sense that they also die and retire… Let me get to the point rather - which is that while there are some people in every group of media people who are driven by agenda and a motive that becomes ulterior, or maybe it was at the start, you won’t find much evidence of that in the group following this tour.
Just to come here in these times of Covid, when interaction is so limited and, for goodness sake, for the first few weeks of the tour they weren’t even able to drink because of the level 4 lockdown, you have to be a rugby person. Someone who loves rugby. Who cares for the game. Who cares deeply for the ethos of the Lions and what it means to rugby.
Like most in my craft, I am ready to agree to disagree when someone expresses a view I don’t agree with, and on Wednesday, over those pints of brown beverage, I did. But one thing that came across clearer than a whiskey that has been diluted with too much water, is that there is a genuine feeling that Rassie Erasmus did the game a disservice with his video.
As much as I get it, with some reservations, because I understand Rassie’s long-held frustration at the inherent weakness in the game that comes with having to paint pictures for referees and bend over backwards to blunt the perceived unconscious bias among officials, they just don’t.
And if you throw Clive Woodward into it, and the former Lions and England World Cup winning coach’s rather hypocritical condemnation of Erasmus when he himself produced power-point presentations to the travelling media in New Zealand in 2005 condemning the Tana Umaga tackle that put Brian O’Driscoll out of that series, it turns out they don’t support him either. Neither are they crazy about England coach Eddie Jones’ attempts to influence referees. So they are hard to argue against.
The bottom line, though, is that just like it is only people who have been prejudiced against who can properly talk about prejudice in terms of what it does to you and how it makes you feel, is that it is just hard to properly get something that is so beyond the context of their reference points.
Maybe we sometimes just have to accept that it is hard to understand a South African issue without being a South African. In the same way that an outsider will probably never really understand the bigger than the game subtext that drives the Boks to be so nigh unbeatable once they reach a World Cup final.
A PROTEA EXAMPLE TO EXPLAIN SA MINDSET
One thing I am sure of though, and I did explain this to some of them, is that any kind of vilification of the Boks or their beloved former coach now turned celebrity waterboy, only helps fuel the home team’s motivation.
I used the 2018 Proteas test series against Australia as the best example of the South African psyche. That was the sandpaper-gate series, the one where the Proteas were being well beaten in the first test until David Warner decided to get cocky and became overly abusive to Quinton de Kock.
It escalated from there, and while I am not a cricket writer, I followed that series closely enough as a fan to note the way the fight galvanised Faf du Plessis’ team. They became unbeatable after that. And while the South African national cricket team has slipped since then, and I am open to correction, I can’t remember an occasion subsequent to 2018 when Australia have beaten the Proteas.
In many ways, the spitefulness of this rugby series is reminiscent of that cricket series, and if the Boks end up winning it after coming from being a test down there will be even more of a similarity, and driven by the same South African appetite for a fight once the battle lines have been properly drawn.
It isn’t the UK and Irish media corps that is motivating the Boks this time, but World Rugby, but their treatment of the Rassie controversy does contribute to it.
SOME LIONS WON’T BE CRAZY ABOUT THE ENGLISH EITHER
What we might forget, and sometimes I think the England based scribes covering a Lions tour might forget, is that the Lions are not England. Indeed, for Welsh, Irish and Scottish players, it is only during these once in every four year tours that the English aren’t as much the sworn enemy as they are for some South Africans.
You just have to speak to John Allan, who played for Scotland before he became a Springbok, about the extent of the Scottish motivation before any game against England. Think Rassie Erasmus as portrayed on Chasing the Sun before the World Cup final against England, and just give him a Scottish accent and you might not be far away.
What has been funny on this tour has been listening into the Lions’ zoom press conferences, which seldom feature any contributions from the traveling media by the way and most questions come from people sitting in living rooms or even bedrooms overseas, and picking up the bias of the Celtic nations.
If there is an Irish media person picking up for the next question, you can take poison the question being related to some Irish player who has just been included or left out of the team. If it is a Welshman asking the question, expect it to be about the omission or inclusion of any one of Ali Price, Liam Williams, Josh Adams…just fill in the name of the relevant Welsh player.
IT WAS RED BUT THE LAW IS AN ASS
One thing I did agree with my friends from overseas on was that according to the law, the Cheslin Kolbe yellow card should have been red. Unsurprisingly though, given how much there is a genuine care for rugby and concern for where it is going, they were also in complete agreement with my view that if that is the law, then the law is an ass.
There are far too many cards of any hue blighting the sport in the modern era and it has to be a concern when coaches, as the coaches of both sides (well lets count Rassie as a coach in this instance) have in this series, bleat about incidents they felt should have been red or yellow cards and then appear to use the failure for those incidents to be sanctioned as an excuse for losing.
The 2017 Super Rugby final was ruined by the red card shown to Kwagga Smith for one of those challenges on an airborne player that was more an accident brought about by recklessness than inspired by any malicious intent. Even though it looked like there was some kind of aggressive intent, the Kiwis might argue the same about the Sonny Bill tackle that changed the course of the 2017 All Black series against the Lions.
When it comes to the tackle, and the small margins that separate the legitimate tackle from the tackle that will net a yellow card and then in turn the tackle that separates the yellow from the red, with it all being about which part of the body is connected with, there is also so much grey area.
My solution to this morass of problems that might be chasing away eyes from the sport, for after all everyone surely wants rugby to be 15 against 15, has has always been the one that was partially trialed in South Africa during the Rainbow Cup - punish the red-carded player by permanent banishment but allow him to be replaced after a period of time.
SCARRA’S EXPERIENCE PROVES MY POINT
My point in the previous entry was brought home to me when watching Western Province play the Bulls in the Currie Cup last Friday night. I didn’t need to watch the game live as I wasn’t writing a match report that night, but thought I would as I expected it to be entertaining. But once WP hooker Scarra Ntubeni was sent off, I stopped watching, as from there it was always going to be only one result.
How many others might have joined me in switching off at that point? There are exceptions of course, and the last Bulls visit to Cape Town was one of those rare exceptions, but 15 against 14 is usually a recipe for boredom.
To make matters worse, when it was reviewed it turned out the decision to send Scarra off was wrong. That red card has been expunged from his record. But the result of the game stands and the game as a spectacle remains ruined.