Visiting a neglected rugby mine

“How do the Stormers feel about playing such a big game in Gqeberha?” It is because I don’t know the answer to that question, asked by a journalist colleague enjoying Sun City and the Nedbank Golf Challenge this weekend, that I am here.

Here in this case being a self catering apartment in Summerstrand, on the Gqeberha beachfront, the base from which on Saturday I will travel to Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium to watch the Stormers play Toulon in the Investec Champions Cup.

I arrived yesterday (Thursday) after a road trip that included an enjoyable night at the Wilderness Beach House Backpackers. If you haven’t done the backpacker thing, and want to taste it, try that place. As backpackers go, it’s a goodie.

But let’s not start out this first travel/rugby column since the one penned from a safari tent in Skukuza the day after the Springboks smashed, humiliated, decimated and left for dead the Los Pumas in Nelspruit in late September with another of those digressions. It is too early in the piece for that.

So it’s not just about wanting to see if the Stormers coaches and players are lying through their teeth when they say they enjoy Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium as if it’s their home patch in Greenpoint, which is probably just over 800 kilometres from here regardless of whether you are flying like a crow or travelling along the N2 in a Navara bakkie.

It’s also about wanting to see how rugby is going in a very fertile yet horribly and tragically neglected breeding ground for the sport in this country. Call out their names - Kolisi, Mapimpi, Am, Fassi etc etc - and they come from here. But there’s no team representing the region the future players of that ilk can aspire to.

Which if you were to ask me is ridiculous. That this region, which starts just south of Tsitsikamma and ends at the Mtamvuna Bridge near Port Edward on the KZN South Coast, and extends inland towards Aliwal North (Frans Steyn and Johan Goosen are from that area) if you are traveling the N6 from East London, is like a gold mine. Only for rugby players, not gold, so it’s like a rugby player mine.

UNTAPPED GEMS GO UNDISCOVERED


The only problem is, there are apparently so many untapped gems that go undiscovered, which I was reminded over a lunch I had with former Bok World Cup winning prop Garry Pagel (1995 edition) at the famous old Pig and Whistle Pub in Bathurst (I think it’s the oldest such establishment in this country) a few years ago.

Garry had been helping out with coaching in one of the far flung areas of rural Eastern Cape and he said the talent he saw made his eyes bulge out of his head. Only no-one seemed to care about it, the players weren’t offered the encouragement they needed. He became disillusioned.

And it must be disillusioning to the genuine rugby people of the Eastern Cape that there is no local team to support, and that the players who want to make it have to move to Durban or Cape Town. How much better and more settled might they be if they could just stay put, near their families? Those who can hack moving are probably the ones that make it. Those who can’t, don’t.

Back in the day, and I really mean back in the day, there were unions much closer to home for people of the rural Eastern Cape. Another former Bok prop, from a similar vintage to Pagel, who hailed from rural Eastern Cape was Keith Andrews (actually his cousin Mark too, who along with Os du Randt was spawned in the Elliot farming region). One of Keith’s first rugby memories, or so he told me, was watching North Eastern Cape playing the All Blacks in, if my memory is correct, Burgersdorp.

Okay, we have televisions now, but how much more inspiring must it be for youngsters to go and watch their heroes in the flesh? You don’t have to remind me about the mismanagement that has stymied both Border and Eastern Province in the past, but that’s not the fault of the passionate rugby people - well I am assuming they are passionate, tomorrow I will find out - who live in Gqeberha.

There used to be strong structures in place in this region on both sides of the old divide that unfortunately plagued not just rugby but every walk of life in the apartheid era. One of the reasons I have a soft spot for rugby in this region was because during my university years in Grahamstown, now Makana, I spent many Saturday’s driving through to the old Boet (Boet Erasmus) to watch Eastern Province play Currie Cup games.

They never won the competition, actually they never came close, but they had the likes of the legendary Danie Gerber playing for them, the Human brothers, Pote and Sieg, Bolla Serfontein, Hannes Strydom, Garth Wright, the late Frans Erasmus and just before that, two tough old locks in Schalk Burger (Senior) and George Rautenbach. There was someone called Rassie Erasmus who I hear has a good rugby brain who learned the sport while being schooled in Despatch.

That’s not to mention players like Deon Kayser, who later became a Bok when he played for the Sharks (one of the first to have to move), and Allister Coetzee (he was a fine scrumhalf) who represented the region at SARU level before making the switch following the unification of the sport when democracy arrived in South Africa.


THE EASTERN CAPE WAS A TOUGH PLACE TO COME

Anyone who played provincial rugby in those years will tell you that the Eastern Cape was a tough place to come and win, and as recently as 2017 I was at a Super Rugby game where the Southern Kings beat the Sharks, coached then by Robert du Preez, in front of a full house at the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium.

That was actually a good year in Super Rugby for the Kings, easily their best. They beat the Bulls at Loftus too, and won some games in Australia. But what happened after that? The number of teams in Super Rugby was reduced, and after a while playing in the Super 14, the Kings disappeared.

So that’s why I am here, I want to see what the vibe of the Eastern Cape rugby public is like now that an event such as Saturday’s game has become just about as rare as a snoek in the Kalahari.

By John Dobson’s account, the vibe was special the last time the Stormers were here, which was for a URC game against the Dragons in 2022. He vowed then to bring the Stormers back to what we used to know as PE. I am not sure he was thinking it would be for such a big Champions Cup game.

CHAMPIONS CUP IS AN EXCUSE TO TRAVEL

It was a pity I did not stick to my initial plan, which was to do the drive from Cape Town today (Friday) and extend it over today and tomorrow. If that had been the case, I’d have been able to suss out how many people are undertaking the trip from Cape Town for this game.

One of the reasons the people in Europe aren’t crazy about South African teams being in the Champions Cup, apart from the fact that no map shows South Africa to be part of Europe, is because for many club supporters over there the competition is seen as an excuse to travel.

Speak to the South African players who have played Champions Cup for overseas clubs and they will tell you about how, particularly in France, the towns would be invaded on the day of the game by supporters of the opposition team. How trains would be brimful of travelling fans. The stories told all make it sound so special, and there are some fans who try to get to every single game their team plays in the competition.

It is understandable that those same people might balk at having a train trip or road trip removed as an option. Well, you could probably drive between France and South Africa, but they tell me it's a long way. And time consuming. I wouldn’t even attempt it on a luxury bus. In fact particularly not on one of those after my experience returning to Cape Town from the All Black test in Johannesburg in August.

WHERE RICEY’S TEAM TRIPPED UP

There I go - I used a capital ’T’ for test in that last paragraph. It is usually a test that gets me on the road, not just a franchise or club game. But hold that phone sports lovers, there is actually a test. The reason I traveled earlier rather than today was because after making the decision to come and see how the Stormers’ outreach might be doing in the Eastern Cape, I remembered that there was a cricket test being played in this city at the same time. Actually, it was there in my subconscious. It must have been.

Let me confess that cricket is probably my favourite sport. Possibly because, as the late doyen of SA cricket commentators, Charles Fortune, might have put it, at heart I am no hooligan. It was Charles who, in one of his radio commentaries when I was at a very impressionable age, ended a stint in a cricket game at the Wanderers by saying “We are going to have to end this now because they want to cross to a game at Loftus, where some hooligans are playing and that game is about to kick off”.

Anyway, before the digression bug hits me, let me point out that I arrived early because I want to pop into St George’s Park to watch the second and hopefully third day of the Proteas test against Sri Lanka.

For me, the ultimate form of the ultimate sport is test cricket. In fact, the shorter version of any sport is anathema to me, which is why I am not in my home city this weekend watching the Sevens. That’s just an excuse to drink beer. Who needs that?

My first visit to St George’s Park was during my university years and it was also my first exposure to the longest format of the sport. It was 1989. The old Transvaal ‘Mean Machine’, captained by Clive Rice, travelled to Port Elizabeth for a Currie Cup final against Eastern Province. The Currie Cup was played over three days in those days, but when the final was introduced that game, for the obvious reason that a draw should be avoided, was extended to four days and later five.

A friend who lived on a farm in Addo and I came to every day of that final, which was a seismic event on the sporting calendar at that time. EP batted first, and the late Phillip Am made 214 and Ken McEwan, in those days farming near Tsitsikama and a prolific scorer in Country Cricket for Essex, made 191.

KEPLER WAS UP WITH THE TIMES

From memory, and I hope I don’t have this wrong, an at that stage very young Clive Eksteen dropped one or both of those batsmen when they had very little. EP went on to make over 500, with Vlam Michau striking a rapid and belligerent 79 towards the close of the second day. Kepler Wessels was the EP captain, and was criticised for not declaring. EP batted for half the game.

But the reason Kepler was criticised was because in this country we didn’t have any understanding of the test format. Kepler, having played for Australia, did. By batting as long as he did, and his team making as much as he did, Transvaal, who for so long had dominated SA domestic cricket, were batted out of the game. And sure enough, they were so demoralised when they eventually went out to bat that the likes of Henry Fotheringham were unable to make their usual impression. EP won by a mile and even though I was a Natal supporter, and my mate from Addo was Western Province, it was an unforgettable weekend.

OUTREACH

Hopefully this will be an unforgettable weekend for Eastern Cape rugby fans. Driving up here during the week the mind went to the state of the sport in this country. I have already mentioned how as recently as 1970 the All Blacks were still playing tour games in the Platteland. As recently as the late 1990s I listened to Heyneke Meyer, later of Bok and Bulls coaching fame, talking about how he wanted to turn George into the Bath of South African rugby.

He was coaching the South Western Districts Eagles at the time, and they did pretty well in the Currie Cup. The stadium in the Garden Route city is a small one, but it was regularly filled for games, and I always found an excuse to head through for their big games. I was working for The Argus in those days, and they must have had lots of money. Or the sports editor, Archie Henderson, recognised that I had constantly itchy feet. He once sent me to Windhoek for a Stormers training camp and when I asked him to brief me on what the newspaper expected from me his response was that I should “Have a good time”. Or something like that. I did.

My most recent visit to St George’s Park was on a weekend when I was here for a Vodacom Cup game - yes, Vodacom Cup! - and it coincided with a test between the Proteas and Pakistan. I think it was 1998.

Anyway, let’s not digress - Heyneke was onto something, but it obviously died a death, for it would be hard to remember when last the Eagles played a really big game. How many people know who coaches them?

Down here it is the same, but it does make sense for the Stormers to connect with the people in this region. Back in the day, meaning the second half of the 1990s, EP was twinned with Natal to make the Sharks in Super Rugby, but that never made sense. For the simple reason that Cape Town and PE are more accessible to one another than PE and Durban, mainly because if you drive between Cape Town and PE you travel the Garden Route and you don’t have farm animals walking all over the road like you do when you drive through the old Transkei.

WHAT IS IT WITH THESE ROAD SIGNS

So I am always careful to refer to Gqeberha as Gqeberha and not as its old name of Port Elizabeth. I imagine that is what the City Fathers would prefer. Yet when driving here from Cape Town there is no mention of Gqeberha on any road signpost. And driving into the city it was almost tempting to stop at the side of the road to ask someone “Where is Gqeberha, I only see signs for Port Elizabeth?”

And if you are driving in from the Cape Town side and are intending to carry on on the N2 towards Durban and the old Transkei, be warned that you shouldn’t look for any sign directing you to Makana, the new name for Grahamstown. It’s still Grahamstown. The aforementioned Charles Fortune, who was a school master in Grahamstown for many years, would be confused, not least because in his commentaries he used to insist on calling EP players who had been schooled in that city (it is a city because it has a cathedral), such as Rupert Hanley and Rob Armitage, as having been “schooled down in Albany”…