SATURDAY WILL BE A BIG MOMENT NOT JUST FOR SA
How the Georgian referee Nika Amashukeli officiates the scrums in Saturday’s decisive third test of the Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry series will be a big moment not just for South African rugby, but also the sport globally. For it could determine the continued relevance of what has long been the very life-blood of the union code, the scrum.
Referee Angus Gardner rightly copped some flak from critics for the way he stood off making any proper calls at the scrums in the second test in Cape Town. The Springbok scrum coach Daan Human was polite when he faced a press conference on Tuesday, saying that the Australian referee was consistent. Which of course he was - he consistently refused to penalise collapses, which of course was really wonderful for the pursuit of what the Kiwis so crave. Ball in play time. Note my sarcasm.
But what did we expect Human to say? World Rugby forbids criticism of referees. If you do, you’re in hot water. What we are told though is that Human was apoplectic with anger during the game, with Gardner effectively removing one of the big Bok strengths.
We can kind of understand why Gardner refereed like he did. In fact, we expected it - and you can look for my supersport.com preview of the game to confirm that. The referee's name was in the headline. Apart from the fact that he is noted among some coaches as being one of the more impressionable and persuadable refs on the circuit, Gardner is Australian.
In his country, like New Zealand, rugby union is under threat from the League code. So there’s a drive there to make the scrum less impactful, to make it just a means to restart the game, and not the battle for ascendancy it has been throughout the union code’s history. If you watch Super Rugby you will see what I mean. It’s very different to what you see in the best club competition in the world, the Champions Cup.
But Amashukeli is not Australian. He’s Georgian. In other words, he’s from a country that bases it’s rugby identity around scrumming. If Amashukeli refs in such a way at the FNB Stadium that suggests he’s taken instruction from above, with there being a lot of Kiwi and Aussie influence in the corridors of power at World Rugby, then the sport in his country is in trouble.
And the scrums being removed as a decisive narrative in rugby union would then be a concern for the likes of France, England and all the other countries where the scrum is part of the fabric of the sport and who said as much at the last Shape of the Game conference.
GUESSING WHAT RENNIE WOULD DO IF HE COACHED CRICKET
Seeing the naked attempt by the All Black coach Dave Rennie to try and negate the Bok strength by making it clear from the first game of this tour, when the tourists were dominated by the Stormers scrum, that he had issues, and then announcing he had flagged issues to World Rugby, got me going down my cricketing analogy path.
So here we go - those who have followed test cricket and the way that format has evolved over the past 50 years will know all about how the West Indies, driven by a fearsome and aggressive fast bowling attack, dominated the sport from the second half of the 1970s and through the early 1980s.
With the likes of Malcolm Marshall, Michael Holding, Andy Roberts and Joel Garner, and you will note I haven’t even mentioned Sylvester Clarke, Colin Croft or Wayne Daniel, who were also terrifying when they played, backing each other up, the West Indies became almost unbeatable.
There was no let up for the batsmen, and only those who thrived on playing short pitched bowling, such as the two South African educated England batsmen Alan Lamb and the late Robin Smith, were able to make any kind of statement with the bat.
You can imagine the concern that must have caused the cricketing establishment at the time. The joy of watching the front foot drive was almost removed from the game, at least when the West Indies were bowling. So what did the International Cricket Conference (ICC) do? They brought in a one bouncer per batsman in one over limit.
That was in 1991. By 1994, after strong pushback from people who felt that fast bowling, and the use of short pitched bowling, was part of the lifeblood of cricket, that was readjusted to two bouncers an over.
But it did not placate West Indies aligned cricketing people who saw the attempts to adjust for what they probably were, and my mate Doctor Alan Inglewood, otherwise known as AI, will tell you that the likes of Curtley Ambrose have retrospectively argued that the restrictions were specifically designed by administrators to handicap a dominant and predominantly black team.
Is that not similar to what is happening now in rugby, and if Rennie was a cricketing coach in the 1980s and due to visit the Carribean, would he not have led the charge against the dominance of fast bowling?
I do wonder if the All Black drive to reduce the contest aspect of the scrum would be as focused as it is if they still had the likes of Craig Down, Sean Fitzpatrick, Olo Brown and Richard Loe still playing for them…
WE SHOULD BE TURNING ON OUR FOUL MOUTHED COACH
It’s been a weird old week. I’ve been in Johannesburg covering the Boks, and the All Blacks stayed in Cape Town until Wednesday, so I haven’t been to any of the touring squad’s press conferences, but there have been some pretty weird angles from the media coverage of this tour.
I don’t like criticising fellow journalists as they have their audience to write for, so no names will be mentioned, but the angst that Rassie appears to be causing and the reaction to it has become quite comical.
The issue of Rassie changing the playing team from within his selected match day of 23 was addressed in my previous column so no need to labour it here, except to point out that he hasn’t been sanctioned for it and we all know how World Rugby fall all over themselves in their rush to sanction Rassie when they can. So clearly he did nothing wrong then? So what’s the issue?
But one of the Kiwi writers making a meal of Rassie using a few swear words in a press conference. Demanding he be sanctioned by World Rugby for that, presumably because it is obvious he can’t be sanctioned for anything else, does kind of take the cake.
This RGR series is a rugby union series. It is not a Miss World or Miss Universe pageant where the contestants have to be squeaky clean with everything they say or do. Anyone who saw the first great rugby documentary, ‘Living with Lions’, that focused on the 1997 British and Irish Lions tour to this country, will know that rugby players swear. And coaches. And not just Keith Wood, who used some pretty colourful language in that documentary.
Then 22 years later we got ‘Chasing the Sun’, the docu-series run on Supersport and DSTV of the 2019 World Cup triumph and then the second edition four years later after the 2023 triumph. Rassie swore a lot. Some people might have been offended, but for most it was a fascinating view of reality.
I am not anti-woke, but for goodness sake, there’s so much happening in the world at the moment that causes real harm, real hurt. One or two little F-bombs hurts no-one, those who don’t know expletives exist must live on Mars, and anyway we journalists edit them out or translate them into fx#$ when we write our stories just in case there are sensitive viewers. And I am assuming the broadcast companies apply the bleep to those words too.
The same writer seems to have an issue with us SA rugby media supporting Rassie. Well, he’s won two successive World Cups (Jacques Nienaber was the coach but Rassie was there as director of rugby), three Rugby Championships and a Lions series. He’s paid to win games and competitions for his country. I’d look a right chump if I called for Rassie to be axed because he has a foul mouth, wouldn’t I?
GALA DINNER WAS A REMINDER OF WHAT SA USED TO GET WRONG
I was privileged enough to attend the RGR Gala Dinner hosted by SARU on the 28th floor of a building on Cape Town’s foreshore two nights before the second test. It was great to see some of the heroes of the past there, both South African and New Zealand. People such as Zinzan Brooke, who joined the 1995 Springbok World Cup winner Joel Stransky in being inducted into the World Rugby Hall of Fame.
I’ve always thought of Joel as one of the least pretentious rugby stars, particularly post his career, and his award was richly deserved, as was Zinzan’s. But it was the past players we don’t see often I particularly enjoyed seeing. I didn’t catch up with him, but Tiaan Strauss was there, so was Carel du Plessis, and Morne du Plessis, still to my mind one of the most statesmanlike Bok captains, and team managers, ever.
Rob Louw, who did a book post his career but probably has another in him after what he’s gone through subsequently, was also there, and it was when chatting to him that I got thinking - almost every one of the old Boks was a reminder of the South African rugby pre-Rassie propensity for shooting itself in the foot.
Let’s start with Rob. He was the incumbent Bok No 6 flank when the squad left for New Zealand in 1981, but he was left out of some of the tests on that tour, as was the tour captain Wynand Claassen.
Then there’s Joel. He won a World Cup in 1995, but in 1994, when the Boks toured New Zealand, he was omitted, with Lance Sherrell being brought in by the seven man selection committee - coach Ian McIntosh was overruled - as a left field selection.
Joel, who also should have had the advantage of being well versed in the coach’s “direct rugby” style, was the perfect rounded flyhalf needed for the New Zealand conditions, and I reckon the Boks would have won that close series had he worn the No 10 jersey ahead of Hennie le Roux, who was still getting to grips with Mac’s game-plan.
Carel got chosen as the Bok coach when he was still very new to the coaching game and he wasn’t ready for it, and the Boks lost a Lions series (1997) as a result. Tiaan of course ended up playing for Australia after being left out of the 1995 World Cup squad, something that some felt was a case of the end justifying the means - he was supposedly set up to clash with the captain Francois Pienaar - but I will never agree it was the right decision.
Oh, and Ashwin Willemse was there too. He wasn’t done in by selection, but if it was not for his poor run of injuries, he would have been one of the Boks’ finest ever wings. He was the standout in the mediocre team that fell short in 2003, which by the way was this country’s apex year when it came to conspiring against self if you remember Staaldraad and all that.
TEICH HAD A RAW DEAL TOO
Gary Teichmann was around at the start of this tour, at the unveiling of the trophy at a function in Bryanston and then he joined Sean Fitzpatrick in taking it onto the field before the first test. If ever there was a Bok captain who got a raw deal it was Teich, and I am not even referring to how his career ended, when he was dropped by Nick Mallett ahead of the 1999 World Cup.
Nope, I am referring to the two lost series in successive years, first to the 1996 All Blacks and then to the 1997 Lions. In the second one, as already mentioned, the Boks were handicapped by the choice of coach. In the first, when Andre Markgraaff was the coach, there were all sorts of off the field issues that happened away from the public eye that made it almost impossible for those Boks to properly front the All Blacks.
People may remember James Small being suspended by the management for breaking a curfew, manager Morne du Plessis being publicly embarrassed by his media liaison man and indeed his captain (at that stage still Pienaar) when he spoke out against the waving of old flag by spectators at test matches, but not many might know about the money issues.
The World Cup winning Boks had been awarded massive contracts the year before that to keep them loyal to the establishment in the face of the threat posed by a rebel group likened to the Packer circus that changed the face of cricket in the late 1970s.
It led to problems over the next few years, as players who came in who had not been part of the World Cup felt they were being under-paid to make up for the World Cup Boks, some of whom were no longer good enough to even be in the group, being overpaid.
One of those newcomers, along with Teichmann and Andre Venter, was Henry Honiball, a farmer from Bergville/Winterton. Those who were there tell me how at a lunch time meeting ahead of the New Zealand series, the coach Andre Markgraaff, who never himself had real control of the purse strings, had told the players they were just going to have to accept what they were being paid and get on with it.
But then Markgraaff was stopped in mid-sentence by Honiball ostentatiously looking at his watch.
“What’s the matter Henry?”
“Coach, I am just checking the time to see if I can make it back to my farm by nightfall. I am losing money on the farm by being away and if I am not going to be paid properly I am going to have to go back to the farm and focus on that.”
Apparently that was a deal breaker, and good thing too, for Honiball became the finest Bok flyhalf of that era. My point being though that Teichmann was the unfortunate guy who had to captain the Boks through all that upheaval (Pienaar was first injured and then later in 1996 he was dropped).