Advertisement

Relive 1995 opening game - A day of excited anticipation but low expectation

rugby25 May 2020 06:37| © SuperSport
By:Gavin Rich
Share
article image
Joost van der Westhuizen © Gallo Images

When South Africans woke up exactly 25 years ago today (Monday), the day of the start of the 1995 Rugby World Cup, with South Africa set to host Australia in Cape Town, there was a lot of excitement but there wasn’t too much expectation or hope.

The Wallabies were world champions at the time, and rated by many as tournament favourites, while the Boks were newcomers to the global tournament and hadn’t really set the rugby universe alight since returning from the isolation years forced by the world’s condemnation of apartheid three years earlier.

In retrospect, however, perhaps there should have been a little more hope. The Springboks had to that point been unbeaten in test matches under the coaching of Kitch Christie, who’d taken over from Ian McIntosh halfway through the year before. Two wins over Argentina on home soil had been followed up with victories in Cardiff and Edinburgh over Wales and Scotland respectively on a 1994 end of year tour that went to Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

It was at Dublin, right at the end of a seven week tour that had offered some encouragement, that Christie suffered his only defeat as Bok coach. Francois Pienaar’s team lost to a Barbarians team that surprised the South Africans by not really entering into the spirit of the Barbarians occasion. Instead of playing Barbarians running rugby they played to win, and that got them the result.

It wasn’t a test match, so it wasn’t entered on Christie’s record as an international defeat. The win over Scotland at Murrayfield had shown some indication of the Bok ability, as did a massive win over the powerful Swansea club team, who boasted a good historical record against touring sides, early on the tour.

Indeed, that 78-7 win on Guy Fawkes afternoon in Swansea was seen as a loud warning to the rest of the world by the British media, with Steve Bale of The Independent describing it as “the most conclusive achievement of any touring team to have ever visited these islands”.

And the gush over the Boks was to continue after the 34-10 win over Scotland, which was a very comprehensive performance. For instance, former England lock Paul Ackford, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, had these words to say: “If they carry on getting better, the Springboks are in danger of starting the World Cup as firm favourites.”

Stephen Jones, writing in the Sunday Times, was even more emphatic in his praise. “It’s official. South Africa are awesome”. The wittiest line came from former Welsh international and British Lion, John Taylor. Writing in the Mail on Sunday, Taylor wrote “Scotland planned a party to celebrate the completion of the new palace of Murrayfield, but again they had to settle for a wake.”

OVERSEAS POSITIVITY FORGOTTEN IN BUILD-UP TO WORLD CUP

The overseas positivity towards the Boks had been forgotten though in the build-up to the World Cup on South African soil six months later. There was an excellent win over Samoa in Johannesburg in a warm-up game a month before the tournament kicked off, the Boks hitting 60 points on the night, but that was a shard of light amidst what generally looked a gloomy outlook.

The Wallabies were a different team back then to what they are now. They arrived at that World Cup as champions, having won the 1991 World Cup in England under the coaching of Bob Dwyer and captaincy of Nick Farr-Jones. Farr Jones wasn’t there for a repeat, but Dwyer was, along with several other acknowledged world class players of that time, including the skipper, flyhalf Michael Lynagh.

The Boks had pushed the Wallabies in Australia under McIntosh’s coaching in a closely fought series a couple of years before, but on their last visit to Newlands, the second comeback test in 1992, they had been comprehensively outplayed. The Wallabies had shown fine form, they’d been the best team in the intervening years between the World Cups, everyone was expecting them to win again.

EVEN THE BOKS WEREN’T THAT CONFIDENT

Even the Boks themselves, although they had listened to an inspirational speech from the statesmanlike team manager, Morne du Plessis, who had led the national team himself between 1976 and 1980, didn’t go in feeling they were favourites. Du Plessis told them that “this is a defining moment in your lives”, but Joel Stransky, who was to go on to become a global hero because of his exploits at that World Cup, remembers feeling that his team were underdogs.

“What made that opening game so special was that there had been such low expectations (in the build-up),” Stransky told me in my recent book, Our Blood is Green.

“So when we rocked up at Newlands, the crowd was unbelievable and the fans were all over us. But there was still an atmosphere of, ‘There is a little bit of hope here, but we really shouldn’t win this game.’”

Part of the low local expectation was rooted in some of the uncertainty, Stransky’s position being part of that, in the months before the World Cup. Stransky had struggled to adjust to Christie when the former Transvaal coach first took over, and had battled with form on the 1994 end of year tour. So much so that Hennie le Roux ended up playing flyhalf ahead of him.

There was so much debate over both flyhalf, and indeed the midfield, that there was even at one point speculation that the legendary Naas Botha, then 37 years of age and retired for more than two seasons, might come out of retirement to stake a claim. Christie appeared to actively encourage this, and Botha played for an Invitation team in a curtain-raiser to that year’s Super 10 final between Transvaal and Queensland at Ellis Park.

It didn’t quite work out though, and instead Christie went for Stransky, but at the same time came up with a bit of a masterstroke selection by selecting a flyhalf in Le Roux to play alongside him at inside centre. Le Roux proved to be tailor-made for the No 12 jersey, and having him alongside appeared to boost Stransky’s confidence.

LEAVING OUT STRAUSS ROCKED THE NATION

But the Bok troubles before the World Cup weren’t just focussed on the flyhalf position. Provincialism was still rife in South Africa at that time, just three years after the end of isolation, when the Currie Cup games were contested like test matches. Rugby supporters in the Cape were incensed, perhaps rightly so, that Tiaan Strauss, the respected “lion of the Kalahari”, and the Western Province captain and by then an established international player, was left out of the squad.

That had happened after a particularly bruising and truculent game between a shadow Bok team, parading as the SA President’s XV, and WP at Newlands. It was set up as a final trial for players in the invitation side as well as some of the contenders in the Province side. Strauss played out of his boots in leading WP, who lost only in the dying minutes to, of all things, a drop-goal from Stransky, who was by then playing his provincial rugby for WP after achieving success with Natal.

His gigantic performance against the shadow Boks was considered by most people to be good enough to force his way back into Christie’s team - he had been dropped on the previous year’s end of season tour - but although Christie did select two of the local players that had played that day, prop Garry Pagel and loose-forward Robby Brink, Strauss’ name was not in the group that was named on the Sunday night after the game at a function at the Holiday Inn in Woodstock.

I remember that function for being tackled by some of the Bok players, Balie Swart in particular, about a column that I had written in The Cape Argus which had poked fun at Christie for pretty much selecting all his favourite Transvaal players and ignoring some good ones (if Strauss was unlucky, so was Natal’s Gary Teichmann, and there were others).

If you dish it out you have to be prepared to take it, and I took quite a bit that night. That wasn’t the reason though, as the late James Small observed when we had a drink together at that function, that my hands were shaking. That’s a hereditary condition I’ve had since birth, though it might be accentuated at times of stress.

Talking to me many years later, in what was probably his last interview before his untimely death a month later, Small told me for my book that most of the non-Transvaal players in that Bok squad agreed with my views. But there was method to Christie’s apparent madness.

“That selection was motivated by a personal issue: the Strauss versus Pienaar issue,” recalled Small.

“Tiaan just didn’t get on with Francois. Not from day one. I am still very good mates with Tiaan, but Kitch made that call, and he made the right one. Tiaan had been a captaincy candidate before Francois, we would have had two separate camps.

“I know Tiaan really well. I know him better than I know Francois. And I think Tiaan would have put his differences with Francois aside for that World Cup for the sake of the team effort, and had that happened, we would have been an even better team than we were. But I still think that perhaps some of the guys would have supported Francois and some would have supported Tiaan.”

According to Small, Christie would have figured out that although he played most of his rugby at No 8, Strauss was really in the openside flanker mould. No 6 was Pienaar’s jersey, and Ruben Kruger, who played No 7, was really a No 6 too.

“So Francois’ competition had to be eliminated. And that was what happened. Boom!”

ANTIQUATED TRAINING METHODS

Selection wasn’t the only debating point among South African rugby supporters in the final weeks before the World Cup. There were also disturbing reports filtering about over Christie’s lack of science when it came to training sessions. By then biokeneticists were the in thing at the provincial teams and the old antiquated military style training sessions that had brought Brigadier Buurman van Zyl success at Northern Transvaal in the 1970s were a thing of the past.

But Christie brought it back, with the players risking injury, and indeed in the view of Mark Andrews incurring later wear and tear and perhaps cutting some careers short subsequent to that World Cup, by being made to run up sand dunes - “Because we won the World Cup, there was a perception that his old school approach was correct, but only five of us were still playing rugby three years after that World Cup.”

Andrews also conceded though that there may have been some method to it, something that was to help the Boks when it really mattered.

“Christie was very old-school in his fitness regime,” said Andrews. “Ian McIntosh, when he was coaching the Boks and the Sharks, would tell you ahead of a session what you were going to do and for how long. Kitch would never tell us, and he would drive us, and drive us and we would never know when he was going to stop. I am not sure if it was the intention, but this method probably prepared us psychologically for the World Cup final, when we ended up playing extra time. We knew that physically we could go more than 80 minutes.”

THE HIGH ROAD VERSUS THE LOW ROAD

That World Cup final though was not something on the Bok minds, or indeed any South African minds, when the nation woke up on the morning of 25 May 1995. The hope was just that the Boks would put up a good show, make it a competitive start to the World Cup, and perhaps, just perhaps, steal the win that would suit Christie’s ultimate plan, which was that the Boks would set themselves onto the easier of the two roads they faced if they were going to play in the final.

Christie, who was born in Glasgow, spoke constantly before that opening game about the low road and the high road. A loss to Australia would pit the Boks against England in the quarterfinal and then New Zealand in the semifinal, a win would set them on what he viewed as the high road, with Samoa and France being South Africa’s play-off opponents.

*You can remind yourself of what happened on that memorable, still May afternoon at Newlands 25 years ago by watching the game in full at the start of a month long 1995 Relive programme on SS1, SS5 and CSN, with each game that the Boks played at that tournament being shown on the corresponding date that it happened 25 years ago.

Advertisement