Canadians regret incident that ended Bullet's World Cup

It is 25 years on from the incident at what became known as the Battle of Boet Erasmus that nearly spiked the Springbok momentum, and still the same question that nagged at the time persists - how on earth was it James Dalton who carried the can and had to sit out the rest of that 1995 Rugby World Cup?

Bok hooker Dalton, known as Bullet, was sent from the field by referee Dave McHugh towards the end of a spiteful pool game between the host nation and the Canadians at the old Boet Erasmus Stadium in Port Elizabeth. The match will be screened in full on Wednesday night as the next instalment of SuperSport’s ReLive 1995 series.

You can watch it yourself to see both the incidents that led up to the moment when McHugh sent three players from the field, and decide for yourself whether Dalton deserved the sanction.

Certainly Dalton’s Bok teammates didn’t think so (see Brenden Nel’s story with Hennie le Roux), and neither does Christian Stewart, who later went on to play for South Africa himself but that night was wearing the colours of Canada, the country where he was born and spent the first two years of his life.

‘OUR FULLBACK WAS TO BLAME’

“There’s a rule in rugby that the third person who comes in to a fracas gets pinged but James wasn’t even the third person in and I cannot understand why he got sent off,” says Stewart a quarter of a century on from what was his last game for Canada.

“The person who was responsible was my teammate, Scott Stewart, our fullback. Scott is a lovely guy and is coaching somewhere in the USA presently, but something snapped in him that night and he was wholly responsible for what happened. He was the one who conflated the incident. He was the third person in.

“I can’t remember if there was any later sanction for Scott, like there was for Bok wing Pieter Hendricks, who was expelled from the tournament by a disciplinary hearing. But even if there was it wouldn’t have been felt in the same way as it was by the South Africans who got expelled from the tournament. It was our last game at that World Cup and the guys sent off or sanctioned later would have maybe missed two club games.”

LIKE WALKING FROM PE TO JOHANNESBURG NAKED

For Dalton, who was then just 22 years old, the repercussions were far worse. The humiliation of being sent off was something he still remembered graphically when I interviewed him recently.

“The incident that led to my sending off happened on the opposite side of the field to where the change-room was. Crossing that field to the tunnel was like walking from Port Elizabeth to Johannesburg stark naked,” he recalled.

“It was that humiliating. To be sent off in a World Cup game was such an intense disappointment that words can’t describe it. I got back into the change-room and quite literally burst into tears.

“Full marks to coach Kitch Christie. The game was still on at that stage but he had the empathy to come down to the change-room and check up on me and make sure I was okay. I was just sitting there with my head in my hands sobbing my eyes out. Kitch tried to console me, but I was inconsolable.

MASSIVE REPERCUSSIONS FOR THE BOK COLLECTIVE

For the Boks it had massive repercussions for the team as a collective, and not just because it twice nearly cost them their chance to win the World Cup later in the tournament when first the semifinal in Durban nearly never happened because of a waterlogged King’s Park field, and then when the final nearly ended in a stalemate. In both instances the Boks would have missed out by virtue of having had a player sent off earlier in the World Cup.

As Hennie le Roux recalls, the Bok campaign could well have been derailed by that incident as there was a lot of fall-out following that game.

“We went off to the old Fish River Sun for a few days and there was much resentment about what had happened and it did impact on our psychology,” recalls the Bok inside centre, who played off the bench that night and admits that he was already frustrated by the Canadian cheap shots when he came onto the field shortly before the incident that dominated the headlines.

“We felt that the Canadians had provoked us and were allowed to get away with it. We felt that James wasn’t really properly defended, that not enough of an effort was made to clear him. It was a different era then, it was before rugby became professional, and James was persuaded not to take a lawyer to the hearing as rugby people should sort the issue out.

“Unfortunately that attitude and approach did not work for James, and obviously it was a terrible thing for him to be sent off and out of the tournament. He never got a chance to play in the later games and I know it had a big effect on him. At that time our tournament could have gone either way. We felt let down, we felt that we weren’t being protected and it had a negative impact on our morale. It took good leadership to get us back on track.”

DALTON’S BONE OF CONTENTION

Dalton backs up Le Roux’s perception that he wasn’t properly defended.

“I had a big bone of contention after the hearing that cost me my place at the World Cup,” says Dalton.

“I felt that the team manager, Morne du Plessis, was only concerned about rugby’s image rather than with my welfare. Doc Luyt (Louis Luyt, the Sarfu president at the time) wanted to get me a lawyer and fight the case full-on. Morne argued against that, he said no, we must go and ‘represent ourselves as rugby men’. Luyt thought that was crazy, and looking back now so do I.

“I was 22 years old, my eyes were as big as saucers. I didn’t know what to do. I just wanted to do what was right for the team. As Morne was the manager, I was inclined to go with his way. Only it turned out I was a lamb being led to the slaughter. Two Frenchmen were running the hearing and they couldn’t speak a word of English. Even the referee didn’t seem too sure why I was sent off.”

Even skipper Francois Pienaar was said to go walkabout in the days that followed that Boet Erasmus blow-up, with his anger understandably boiling over. Apparently it was a conversation with coach Kitch Christie in the bar of the team hotel in Port Elizabeth, after Pienaar had returned later than he should have from the Fish River Sun, which is near Port Alfred, that got the Bok campaign back on track.

CANADIAN REGRET

Stewart says that looking back at the incident with the benefit of hindsight and the maturity that has come with the 25 years that have passed since then, the Canadians regret what happened. He is still part of a WhatsApp group with his old teammates, and has no doubt that if they had their time over again, they would have behaved differently.

“There is no doubt in my mind that the Canadians do regret what happened in that game. Perhaps you need to look at it in the context of the Bok reputation, which was all about their toughness and their physicality. I think when we went into the game there was a lot of focus from the Canadian viewpoint of matching the South Africans physicality, and perhaps there was over compensation.

“The Boks were on a hiding to nothing. We had nothing to lose. We were going home after that game regardless of what happened, so we could go for broke. The Boks by contrast had a quarterfinal to look forward to, they couldn’t afford to get injured and they couldn’t afford to have players sent off.”

Stewart was the ball carrier in the move that led to the incident on the far right touchline, but he did not get involved in the fight that followed.

“The game was effectively over as a contest, the Boks had won, there had been a lot of niggle in the game but I can’t say there was intent from our side for something like that to happen,” says Stewart.

“When the fighting happened I actually went over to one of the Bok players, Brendan Venter, and had a chat with him. We spoke about what we were going to do after the World Cup.”