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STRIKING IT RICH: A rivalry that calls for long journeys

rugby30 August 2024 06:30
By:Gavin Rich
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Pieter-Steph du Toit @ Gallo images

RESPECT

That word has been bandied around a lot this week, and it has come from both camps heading into Saturday’s seismic Castle Lager Rugby Championship game at Emirates Airlines Park. Indeed, it was started by the All Black coach Scott Robertson before his team even left New Zealand.

Robertson spoke about the excitement of the challenge of playing the Springboks in South Africa and the respect he and his countrymen had for the traditional foe.

His forwards coach Jason Ryan followed up after the arrival in this country by speaking about the almost ‘feral’ atmosphere the All Blacks will encounter on the way to Ellis Park on match day. And make no mistake, the atmosphere both in the stadium and around it in the buildup to a game is intimidating for foreign visitors.

I can recall myself and a South African colleague giving two Australian journalists a lift to the venue from their hotel in Sandton ahead of a game featuring the Wallabies in 2002. Initially the atmosphere in the vehicle was relaxed. One of the Aussie writers, the late Greg Growden, had been in South Africa to watch the first rebel cricket series in 1982 and remembered in particular the exploits of Vince van der Bijl.

Which gave me the cue to talk ad infinitum about Big Vince, one of the sporting heroes of my youth, and how in my school playing days I managed to ape his bowling style - note: not his ability - and his loud appealing that in my case could be heard at the church adjacent to my old school.

It earned me the moniker Gavin van der Rich. Well, no-one else may be interested in that, but Greg was, and my willingness to feed his interest on the slow journey through the pre-match traffic is still remembered by the SA journalist in the car, Mike Greenaway. But in retrospect, Greg’s willingness to engage in conversation about my cricketing exploits hid the tension that would have been growing.

As we neared Ellis Park and started to smell the braai smoke and the boerewors and see the Bok fans in their pofferbaaidjies, so it became increasingly obvious that both Aussies were freaking nervous. And walking into the stadium, with their heads down so they avoided eye contact with what they might have thought of as a South African beardy wierdy, it was as if they thought of Mike and I as their body guards. Mike maybe fit that role, but me?

Anyway this is becoming a digression, and may take as long as the bus journey I undertook to get to Johannesburg this week, so let me get back to the point - the All Black assistant Ryan felt that as intimidating as the South African rugby psyche, particularly before Joburg games, might be, it was a sign of the massive respect the two rugby nations have for one another. He said it was reciprocated. And it is.

Eben Etzebeth summed it up when he spoke publicly at his surprise when Ireland players told him after the World Cup group game in Paris last September that they’d see him in the final. The Bok enforcer was confounded because he knew the Irish had to play New Zealand to get to the final. What, are you underestimating the All Blacks? Are you crazy?

LOSING TO KIWIS HURTS LESS

It turned out they were, and while this may be a personal anecdotal observation, which these tour diaries are supposed to be, it probably holds true for most South Africans - there was somehow less tension building up to last year’s World Cup final between the Boks and All Blacks than there was to the 2019 final against England.

And for that matter the 2007 final, also in France and which also featured England. Call it arrogance if you like, but given the evidence of a conversation I had with a Kiwi journalist shortly before the kick-off of the 2019 decider in Yokohama, it may be something New Zealanders share with South Africans, for he desperately wanted the Boks to win as he felt England were undeserving.

“Mate, it’s not just because you guys are also southern hemisphere, it’s also because our two nations have always been ahead of the rest.”

And in rugby terms, they have. The Boks led the head to head meetings when isolation arrived, and the All Blacks have taken a comfortable lead subsequent to that, but New Zealand v SA is the big rivalry in rugby. I’d liken it to The Ashes in cricket, but it’s not an accurate comparison because neither Australia or England have been as consistently No 1 and No 2 in the world as the All Blacks and Boks have.

There was that long period of dominance by the West Indies, the Proteas were second for a long time and held the test mace for a bit, and India would challenge any assumptions currently.

There have been 10 Rugby World Cups, and 70 per cent of those have been won by one of the two nations. That sums it up, and why a World Cup win by a nation such as England or Ireland would be seen as a win by usurpers, a team that is not a member of the club. It may not be good for world rugby the way they are hogging the global showpiece, but New Zealanders and South Africans won’t give a tinker’s cuss.

There was a bit of enmity off the field between the local rugby authorities and the Irish tour party and between the two camps in the recent series that you seldom get when the Boks and All Blacks clash. In 2013, before a Championship decider at Ellis Park, the All Blacks tweeted their “mighty opponents” to wish them luck for the game.

AN INTENSE RIVALRY

Having said all that, just in case I’m giving the impression I am going to the stadium on Saturday expecting to watch a love-in, the rivalry is as intense as it can get. The first Bok/All Black series I watched was the 1976 clash between Morne du Plessis’ Springboks and Andy Leslie’s All Blacks.

Both captains are good men and can almost be described as statesmanlike. But what happened on the field in that series would warrant a plethora of red cards in the more genteel modern era. Anyone remember Peter ‘Pole’ Whiting having his ear almost rucked off his head by, if memory serves me correctly, Moaner van Heerden? I do. I was just 11. It made an impression.

And one of the All Black props was so gored in the scrums that he almost lost an eye, prompting the title of the late Barry Glasspool’s book on that tour, “One in the Eye”.

PLANES, TRAINS…AND BUSES

Mention of the rivalry, and how captivating it can be, brings me to a point - this is supposed to be a tour diary, so I should talk a bit about the touring. Earlier in my rugby writing career when I flew over the world to watch the Boks play, I often used to sit in the aircraft before taking off from South Africa wondering what the hell I was doing.

That was particularly the case if the destination was New Zealand. “I am about to fly 26 hours and through a myriad of time zones just to watch a rugby match.” But it was always justified when it was the All Blacks and Boks playing by the fact that, apart from it being work, it was the All Blacks and Boks. In other words, no ordinary game.

And that was my justification when this past Monday I sat in a Greyhound bus at the Cape Town Civic Centre being buffeted by the severe Cape winter waiting for departure for Johannesburg. Unlike the days of yore when I used to dupe the travel agent working for Independent Newspapers that it was okay for her to book all my flights Business Class, which for a time she and I got away with, this time I am paying for myself to be on tour.

And because I want to drive to Nelspruit next month for the Argentina game, and Cape Town to Nelspruit is a sod of a long way even in my fuel efficient Nissan Navara, I elected to do it by bus. It’s a third of the price of flying, perhaps even a smaller fraction of what you’d pay for petrol if you drive the N1.

My choice of travel effectively made Johannesburg almost as far away in travelling hours as Auckland was from Johannesburg when I started out on the 1994 tour of New Zealand. Departure was on Monday at 1:30pm. I arrived at Johannesburg’s Park Station on Tuesday at 9:35am, exactly 54 minutes later than the scheduled arrival of 8:41am.

Why are bus companies so exact to the minute with their scheduling when the journey is over 20 hours and there are road-works etc to contend with? Anyway, I’m not sure it works. It didn’t this week. Maybe I will arrive on schedule at 08:41am in Cape Town on Monday.

Anyone who has traveled on a Dreamliner will know that it isn’t as bad as it sounds. The downstairs of the double-decker bus is effectively Business Class, but the seats that can recline back to make a bed almost turn it into something resembling First Class in air travel. Unfortunately just without the caviar and the champagne and the air stewards and hostesses.

You’re also not at 39 000 feet, and as someone who doesn’t particularly enjoy flying, or to be more precise enjoy anything resembling even mild turbulence, I appreciate not having a pilot announcing that “We are about to encounter a bit of turbulence, please fasten your seatbelts”.

On a few occasions “a bit” has really meant “a lot”, hence my nervousness, and those announcements always produce a nervous sweat much like the one my Aussie mates experienced visiting Ellis Park 22 years ago.

In other ways though travelling Cape Town to Joburg overnight is very much like undertaking an overnight flight to an overseas destination. One marked difference is that on an overseas flight you don’t wake up at 2:30am because you’ve stopped in Kimberley to pick up and drop off passengers. If you did find yourself in Kimberley after going to sleep on an overnight flight you’d have much more than just disturbed sleep to worry about!

JET-LAG

Hmmm, Cape Town to Joburg never entails traveling through time zones, although it did feel like a journey between climatic zones. It was so cold, wet and windy on departure on Monday that the bus windows were all steamed up. I was dressed like an Eskimo, which was problematic when sitting in the taxi that took me from Park Station to the Bok base at the Hyde Park Southern Sun on a day where the temperature eventually reached 28 degrees.

I did get to sleep a bit on the bus, but I’d be lying if I said there was no element of fatigue when the message arrived on my phone that there’d be no Eben Etzebeth in the Bok team that was about to be announced.

It seemed like a massive blow and having typed up my Tuesday Talking Point, which pretty much said the Boks are favourites and have no excuses if they don’t win on Saturday, while the bus was nearing Klerksdorp as the sun was rising, it almost made me recall the story and rewrite it with a different subject.

As it turns out, Eben is playing off the bench, with the Boks bending their own rules, which a rather overtly good humoured Rassie Erasmus told us he might well do provided Etzebeth got through another training session. Which he did.

I have seen some Kiwi media comment that Etzebeth was probably always playing and Erasmus was playing games, but that is not something that Erasmus does.
He may come up with some left field and innovative selections, but he announces his team earlier in the week than any other international team. The message is “This is what we’ve got, we are letting you know, now try to beat us.”

On the Etzebeth question though, South Africans will be rightly glad he is playing on Saturday, but it might have turned out to be a positive stop on the journey to the 2027 World Cup had he not been available.

The enforcer has been a constant in the big wins scored by the Boks during the Erasmus era, perhaps the only constant in terms of individual playing personnel, and it might have been instructive to see how the Boks would go without his presence.

PSTD IS SUITED TO FRONT LOCK

Colleagues chide me sometimes for doing what Erasmus does by occasionally referring to the No 4 lock, Etzebeth’s position, as “front lock”, but in terms of how the lineout operates, that is what it is. And while I didn’t ask Rassie about it at the press conference and we were only allowed one question, which the ‘bus-lag’ prevents me from recalling now, and he may well not have answered it directly anyway as there were a few digressions in that press conference, I do remember something he said to me years ago, before he was Bok coach.

At the time Erasmus didn’t appear to rate Pieter-Steph du Toit, who was then specialising as mainly a No 5 for first the Sharks and then the Stormers, particularly highly. He told me that Pieter-Steph was playing the wrong position, that he’d make “a great front lock”.

So it didn’t particularly surprise me that Du Toit is playing front lock against the All Blacks. He’s strong enough and physical enough to fulfil that role. Indeed, he could probably play just about anywhere outside of the front row, and his utility value reminds me of the flack poor Allister Coetzee took when he selected him to play blindside flank against England in 2016.

Everyone thought Coetzee had lost his mind with that selection. Well, if my memory is correct, he had Willem Alberts at openside, so maybe he had, but the PSTD at 7 move has turned out to be not nearly as dilly as the critics made out eight years ago. Who’d want to be a coach.

Enjoy the rugby and I will chat again from the bus on Sunday night…

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