STRIKING IT RICH: Another sublime rugby weekend in the Slowveld!

Senior rugby writer Gavin Rich gives us his slightly alternative view to covering the Springboks in Nelspruit this past weekend, far from his sheltered existence in Cape Town!

RUGBY COUNTRY

The Lowveld, which is where you find Nelspruit and the venue for the Springboks’ rampaging sound-off to their 2024 Castle Lager Rugby Championship campaign, should be renamed the Slowveld.

Just because everything is so laid back here - yes, I’m still here - that I have to refute something that my colleague Brenden Nel wrote when we were here for the All Black game two years ago.

Noting the large volumes of the sponsor's product that were being consumed in the buildup to that game, and during it, Brenden wrote in a colour piece that “It was a bad day to be a beer in Nelspruit”. Meaning, I suppose, that if you were a beer, you wouldn’t live very long as you’d quickly be consumed.

Let me be honest, I am way too literal, at least this morning, to understand that. I mean who’d want to be a beer? Surely if we are human, and I am assuming it is only humans reading this (if you are a beer and I am offending you, please let me know), that is what we’d prefer to be. Human. Not beers.

But if I was a beer, note the IF, then Nelspruit would be exactly the right place to be. For longevity, at least compared to where I live in Cape Town and certainly also Johannesburg, is much more assured if you are a beer that finds itself on the Slowveld, where it appears to take an inordinate amount of time for a beer to find its way to a human mouth.

So much so that people I was socialising with on Friday night left the place we were at to go somewhere else in the hope they’d be served quicker. Good luck with that, the slow service wasn’t limited to just one venue.

I would have followed them but, as it turned out, my ‘oldie’ impatience, for maybe that is what it was, was overturned by what was initially a grave mistake. There were these things available at the pub we were in called “Specials”, and I thought that I’d buy more than one so that it would delay my next return to the bar.

Brandy and Coke, which is brandy and Coke Zero in my case, is not something I am that acquainted with, but it felt like the right way to go just in case the beers in Nelspruit, to quote Brenden again, were going to have another of those bad Saturdays. Only what I didn’t realise was that a Special meant you multiplied each drink by two.

Which meant I ended up with six just as most of the others of my acquaintance were vamoosing out of the place. Let me just say if you drink a few of those your mood can change for the better, and the music and vibe were very enjoyable after that. Not so my mood on Saturday morning, but that’s another story.

UNRIVALED EXPERIENCE

In all seriousness though, for some of this hasn’t been completely serious for those who are even more literal than me, a test match in Nelspruit provides an unrivalled experience. Because it is a smallish centre (I’m not sure if it’s a town, meaning no cathedral, or a city, which means it has a cathedral, so I’d prefer to fudge it by just calling it a centre), all the rugby people end up congregating in a relatively compact area. Network and catch-up opportunities there were aplenty.

You get a proper rugby vibe in Nelspruit like you don’t get in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town just because those centres (okay, those are definitely cities) are just so much bigger. You do get it in Bloemfontein for the same reason you get it in Nelspruit, and it would probably be electric and combustible in De Aar if SA Rugby ever scheduled a test for there, but Nelspruit does narrowly shade Bloem.

COMBINING WORK WITH PLAY

Plus, of course, if you go to a game in Nelspruit, you can get to sit where I am sitting as I write this - a safari tent at Skukuza in Kruger National Park. Skukuza is not my favourite KNP camp, even though I must say the service is much better than Nelspruit, but if you do come this way, the safari tents, at least those next to the perimeter fence, are the accommodation type to go for. And of course, and if you get this it will be proven that there is internet connectivity (if you hotspot).

My travels take me to Crocodile Bridge later today, hopefully there will be reception there too, and I will be able to report back to you later in the week, in another of these rambling epistles, about the famous lions of that area.

Two years ago, just to justify the mixture of work and play, I wrote that the reason the Boks might start winning more consistently against the All Blacks was because they’d stopped being like the lions of the Kruger, which means scraggly and mangy by comparison because of the internecine conflict within their prides, and more like the lions of the Kalahari (there’s not as much competition for habitat in the Kalahari so the lions are real lions in the same way as some men are real men).

Anyhoo, that theory that the calmness that has descended on what was once a tempestuous rugby landscape was severely tested two years ago when the All Blacks bounced back from a Nelspruit defeat to win in Johannesburg a week later.

What was written from the Shindwezi Rest Camp though two years ago has been vindicated subsequently, with the Boks beating their old foe four times in a row. And counting, for there’s no reason this Bok team shouldn’t improve even more, whereas the Kiwis riddled their own feet with bullets when they chucked South Africa out of Super Rugby.

THE SCHEDULING NEEDS ATTENTION

On that point, those who read my previous editions of this travel diary doubling as a rugby column might recall that there is a lot of respect for New Zealand rugby, plus an appetite for what is to come in 2026. Which will be an excuse to take a long drive around this country to watch the All Blacks play eight games (three test matches, four franchise games and one against SA A).

Hopefully Nelspruit will be scheduled as one of the venues so we can get to experience both the joys of a game at Mbombela and the hospitality of the city/town/centre.

Here’s a request to SA Rugby and their NZ counterparts though - for goodness sake, absorb the reality of South Africa’s changed alignment to the northern hemisphere season, and play the series in November.

If we are going to be aligned with the north, surely we should be playing against southern teams in the northern season, instead of against them in the southern season.

There are lots of downsides to that of course. Yesterday, meaning Sunday, a temperature of nearly 40 degrees was recorded at Skukuza. It was a really good thing in fact that the Nelspruit game wasn’t scheduled for a day later, or for that matter last Thursday, when it was also uncomfortably hot at what would have been kick-off time.

Indeed, Thursday’s weather invoked something that is really rare - people involved with the Springboks not particularly enjoying a round of golf. Not because they have anything against Leopard Creek, of course, for who would, but because it was apparently just so damn hot that it became uncomfortable.

So imagine playing rugby in those conditions. Yet, while noting the drawbacks of summer rugby, South African rugby cannot continue on the current treadmill of rugby all year round and being committed to a southern hemisphere international competition while competing in the northern leagues at franchise level.

And the 12-month season doesn’t work either. Playing the Currie Cup in the off-season is madness, but I think I’ve said this before?

RAIN IN THE KAROO

My journey to the Lowveld, sorry Slowveld, by road was a long one, broken up by one night camping, meaning my own tent and not the fixed safari version I am sitting in now, and two nights in Joburg at my daughter’s place.

The camping site at Karoo National Park, which is just outside Beautfort West and around five and a half hours from Cape Town, is worth a visit if you haven’t been, just don’t drive over the tortoises that like sleeping under the cars when you leave in the morning. Actually, those tortoises are too big to miss.

When they serve venison in a national park it normally means there was a necessity to cull, so even a bunny hugger should have been okay with my meal of kudu - the best kudu steak EVER by the way - at the camp restaurant that night. Not many would have been okay with what happened while I was there though. There was a thunderstorm, followed by a lot of rain, which is supposedly rare in the Karoo.

So rare that it hadn’t been thought about when I left the tent flaps open. Which had been forgotten during the devouring of that kudu steak and the glasses of red that went with it. Needless to say, the tent had pools of water in it when I returned, and coming to think of it I better dry the tent out sometime. I forgot to do so in Joburg, and I am camping in it at Maroela on Thursday.

But this is a rugby column so let me get back to rugby - and the drive from Cape Town did have a rugby element to it. It came in the form of a stop at the takeaway attached to a service station in Laingsberg to get some nourishment. There was only one other person in there, and it just happened to be John Smit. Yes, that John Smit!

John told me he’d been in Cape Town to see his son, who is obviously at school there, and he was travelling back to Pretoria, where he has been living again for the past five years or so.

Ultimately he was heading to Nelspruit too, but probably flying that last leg on Friday, but my point is it was encouraging to me to learn I wasn’t the only person of at least moderate sanity driving the N1. Former Springbok rugby captains obviously do it too.

DON’T KEYS ME ARGENTINA

Seeing it was Argentina the Boks played against, and buried, at Mbombela, the memory came back of an entry in a similar tour diary during a trip to Buenos Aires, the one in 2005 (or was it 2006). Anyway, it was the tour where Jean de Villiers threw a Pumas player into a moat running around the perimeter of the playing field, and he nearly got crucified by the intensely passionate Argentine crowd.

On that same day, the late Diego Maradona arrived to take a seat in the stadium to much applause, just to remind us what really is the No 1 sport in that country.

My most memorable moment though was the embarrassment caused by some language confusion between me and the lady trying to check me into a room somewhere in Buenos Aires. I’d looked at the place, it was up to scratch so I told the agent that “Now I just need the keys”.

She looked at me strangely, so I repeated the statement. “Please, I need the keys”.

Only when she gave me a kiss, which obviously shocked me out of my boots for who would expect such a thing, did I realise why my mention of “keys” made her so uncomfortable.

You live and you learn…like I just have in another sense, and the hard way. By the time I was nearing Nelspruit on Thursday my eyes were so completely shot, and every other vehicle on the road so blurry, that I had no choice but to go for what was my first ever eye test outside of those ones you have to undergo when you renew your driving licence (they did tell me I need glasses last time but you obviously have to live before you learn).

The people who do these tests are apparently experts so the 5k I spent on Saturday morning should have a positive payback in the sense that, apart from making my driving safer, I might finally get to see the same game as you readers get to see and everyone else sees. I am looking forward to that.

The Mbombela Stadium press box is perfect as it gives a good view of the field from an elevated position, which meant I could just make out the wizardry of Manie Libbok in his successful quests to find space and exploit it, but I was constantly having to ask colleague Brenden what was going on when the play was taking place on the other side of the field.

The spectacles I paid for will only come at the end of the week, so the eye problem persists for now. Hopefully there will be elephants on the road today, for at least they are big enough for me to see. I saw some on the way in yesterday. Or at least they looked like elephants.