LET THE GAMES BEGIN…PLEASE!!!
The sooner the first games in the away leg of the Nations Championship kick off so much the better, for it will be then that we can all settle into the narrative of the next few weeks.
In my days of touring to cover the Springboks the first week was always a weird one, in the sense that everything written before the first game felt a bit forced. “There’s nothing really going on,” was the lament sometimes heard by the office back home.
Although, occasionally a Springbok coach would help drive a narrative that would get everyone excited before a ball had even been kicked in anger.
That happened back in 2004, when Jake White told the Irish media ahead of a game at what then was still known as Lansdowne Road that there were no players in the Ireland team that were good enough to play for his Springboks. That really set the cat amongst the canaries, even though Jake was effectively just answering a direct question with a direct answer.
Knowing nothing really happens in the first week of a tour, I was timed to arrive in Dublin late in the week. On some occasions, late actually meant the day of the game itself, although to be fair that instance was all down to having my laptop stolen from my house two hours before I was due to leave for the airport on the intended day of departure, which was the Thursday night so I arrived in Dublin on Friday.
Dinkum, I went out to get something and returned to find that the laptop had disappeared into thin air. Obviously a laptop is indispensable for a journalist, so it required getting a new one, and as obviously, that meant postponing my flight for a day. So I arrived in Dublin on the morning of what turned out to be a narrow Bok win.
In 2004 I got there on the Thursday and was in the same hotel, actually same room, as Mark Keohane, so we ended up going out for a night on the tiles. And it was a proper night on the tiles, which was ended by a morning crossing to Radio 702 where apparently I changed Jake’s name to Jock.
As in “Everywhere we went in Dublin last night the people were just talking about one person - Jock White. The name Jock White was on everyone’s lips.”
And it was, although they might well have called him Jake. Anyway, Ireland ended up winning, but not because their players proved to us that they should have been in the Bok team.
Rather it was having a New Zealand referee Paul Honiss as an extra man that gave them their victory. That was the game where Honiss instructed the Bok captain John Smit to talk to his players as he awarded a penalty against SA near their line, and then allowed Ireland to score a try when Smit and his players were in the huddle.
Let’s hope from a South African perspective that isn’t the narrative after Saturday’s game against Italy in Turin. Meaning some refereeing error. It was last year if you recall the Franco Mostert sending off in the 12th minute that saw a Bok team featuring 14 changes from the previous game having to dig particularly deep.
STARTING IN ITALY IS UNUSUAL
It hasn’t been often that a Bok squad has started a tour in Italy. The Italy game is usually later in the tour, which is why they’ve often been the games where the Bok coaches have mixed up their selection.
You can usually get away with it, but of course Allister Coetzee didn’t in 2016, although it still leaves me gobsmacked every time I see a replay of that loss in Udine and note how many future World Cup winners did actually feature in that game.
From memory, the tours where it has started in Italy were both ones that I was on - 1995 when Francois Pienaar’s World Cup winning Springboks warmed up for a Twickenham clash with England in Rome, and then 1997, when Nick Mallett’s first ever game as Bok coach saw his team smash Italy in Bologna.
I haven’t checked on this but I am sure I am right - that 1995 game was the only game against Italy that the Boks played in Rome. It was at the old Olympic Stadium, where Italy host their Six Nations games, and from memory the atmosphere was more intimidating to visitors than any of the other Italian venues I have visited.
So I asked Mallett, who has coached Italy, on our Talking Boks podcast why the Boks don’t play tour games in Rome, and he explained that while Rome is seen as Italy’s headquarters, in the same way as Twickenham, now yet another of several venues called Allianz Stadium, is England’s HQ, the Italian federation like taking November games to areas where rugby needs to be sold.
He mentioned a game against the All Blacks in his time as Italy’s coach where he felt more than 90 percent of the attendees weren’t rugby people at all and had only come to the game to watch the All Blacks do their Haka.
Apparently the Boks are popular tourists to Italy, which may not only come down to them managing to beat us (2016) whereas they still have to manage that against the All Blacks, but may be sourced in the time when South Africans played in Italy in what used to be our off-season.
Naas Botha spent many years at Rovigo, while Joel Stransky, Steve Atherton, Christian Stewart and AJ Venter were players from the late 1980s into the early 1990s who made the annual pilgrimage and thoroughly enjoyed their time there. Sometimes to the chagrin of their local provincial coaches when there was a bit of an overlap of seasons and they missed the first Currie Cup games.
FLOW OF RETURNEES IS GROWING
So I’m not touring this time but that doesn’t mean things aren’t happening at home. And no, I am not referring just to my addiction to Test cricket that is tempting me to go to Gauteng for the series against Bangladesh that starts on Sunday week. It’s the messages coming into my WhatsApp and email inboxes that are exciting me.
On Wednesday night I was sent an embargoed press release by the Hollywoodbets Sharks. For release at 8am the next day. Manie Libbok is returning to South Africa to play for the Durban team he last represented in early 2021.
That, in contrast to some of the big name signings of the past, is a great signing for the Sharks as Libbok, with the dynamic he brings as an attacking playmaker, is exactly what the Sharks need. He’s recruited to fit into a hole that needs fitting into. In the past some big names have arrived who didn’t really fit in with what the coach was trying to do.
So there’s better alignment between the recruitment and coaching departments at the Sharks now, and it is not before time either.
No sooner had I written and sent the Libbok story early on Thursday than a message arrived in my WhatsApp. As my colleague Brenden Nel pointed out in his story, it was the worst kept secret in the world, but it was confirmation that it was actually happening - Malcolm Marx, the World Rugby Player of the Year as the press release correctly reminded us, will be playing for the Vodacom Bulls for the next three seasons.
And that followed by just a few days the announcement that Kwagga Smith has signed for the same club. So there you are, three current Boks back on home soil, and let’s not forget Cheslin Kolbe, who is a Stormer again after returning from Japan but just has to get over his jaw injury before he plays for them. At this point it seems the 5 December clash with the Sharks in Durban will be when the double World Cup winner pulls on the Stormers jersey for the first time since 2017.
Of course, this flow in the converse direction to the usual export to foreign club trend is not new. He did so via the Sharks, but the double winning captain Siya Kolisi is also at the Stormers, as is Wilco Louw who returned home from Harlequins in England via a few seasons at the Bulls, and although injury forced him to retire, Jan Serfontein followed Handre Pollard back to South Africa to play for the Pretoria team too.
PUTTING BUMS BACK ON SEATS
I remember getting a phone call years ago from an irate Keith Parkinson, then the Sharks president and also a high ranking member of what was then SARFU. Keith’s point of concern was the number of under-strength games the provinces were starting to play in that era - we are talking late 1990s and early 2000s - and gave me a quote I haven’t forgotten: “We don’t want to go the way of provincial cricket”.
You might have to be a certain age to remember a time when provincial cricket in this country really mattered and three day Currie Cup games drew more than Test matches do now at many venues. The limited overs games often drew full houses, and I have a vivid memory of the acrimonious 1982 Datsun Shield final between Western Province and Natal at the Wanderers.
It was won by two runs by WP but those who remember that game will probably not remember the result as much as they remember the genial giant Vince van der Bijl running out future England star Alan Lamb after shying at the stumps at the non-strikers end, and then later in the game Province’s tit-for-tat when their captain Peter Kirsten did something similar to the late Paddy Clift.
By the way, there are two names mentioned there, Clift and Van der Bijl, who will be remembered as real sporting gentlemen, which is indicative of what it meant. I remember Barry Richards, playing what would have been one of his last season’s for Natal, being quoted in the Sunday Tribune the next day, “If they (WP) wanted the money so badly they should just have asked me, I would have given it to them”.
Anyway, I am digressing a bit here before getting to my point - that final was played in front of a packed Wanderers in an atmosphere not unlike what you’d expect at a rugby test match across town at Ellis Park. The key word there is the Wanderers. The home of Transvaal. It was a neutral venue, and it was still packed and the tension was beyond the scale.
So back to Keith’s phone call - he was recognising that when SA was readmitted to international cricket, the provincial tribalism died and so did attendances at provincial games. There was another part to it that he was most concerned about, and that was that the Proteas players hardly played provincial cricket anymore and he felt that explained the drop off in attendance.
He was probably right too. I remember spending a few days watching the Dolphins play a red ball final against the Titans when I was in Durban for rugby business, this was probably around 2001 or 2002, and there was hardly anyone there because the years of teams fielding their international stars had passed.
Even though from memory that game did feature Jonty Rhodes, Shaun Pollock, a very young Hashim Amla and Dale Benkenstein, who scored a very good big double hundred. Steve Elworthy definitely played for the Titans for I remember a very good but unrewarded spell from him to Rhodes on the third morning.
But there’s digression happening again here, let me get to the point, which is that Parkinson was right, the fans do want to see the stars. And when the BetwaySA20 arrived that validated the view. It isn’t just Proteas who play in that competition, there are also highly skilled star players from all over the globe and the games pack venues out.
The Stormers are the only local club that consistently draws big crowds at the level of rugby below internationals these days, but the procurement of exciting, big name players such as Marx and Libbok should draw bums back to the empty seats in Pretoria and Durban, as well as any extra ones that need filling in Cape Town.
He ended up not playing, but one of the draws for me to the Stormers/Ulster game last week was the return of double World Cup winning Bok Bongi Mbonambi to the Stormers colours.
CHAMPIONSHIP CHALLENGES ARE BUILDING
It’s not just about getting bums on seats that the return to this country of star players does, there’s also the impact they have on the teams they play for. Rubbing shoulders with established greats can only help the many future greats that are currently coming through at the local professional clubs. Yes, I said ‘greats’, players like Yaqeen Ahmed and Luan Giliomee, Markus Muller and others, really are that good.
Provided the outward flow doesn’t intensify, and let’s not forget that Zekhethelo Siyaya, that fine young Sharks fullback, is only playing for the Sharks because Aphelele Fassi has taken a year’s sabbatical in Japan, and that Cheswill Jooste got his chance to grab headlines because Kurt-Lee Arendse has gone to Japan, and ditto Riley Norton playing in the hole left in the Stormers’ second row resources by the departure of Salmaan Moerat and Ruben van Heeerden, then the local clubs are on a very good wicket.
There is the right balance of established stars and genuinely special players coming through at all four local clubs - the Lions also have several - but it is the Stormers, Bulls and Sharks that grab me as the clubs that are now reaching a point when it comes to their depth that they will soon be able to compete effectively in the two different competitions they play in.
There was a big turnover in players used by the Sharks when they won three consecutive games on their recent overseas tours, and the Bulls team that put 50 past Scarlets last weekend was also much changed from the one that played in previous games. We will know more when the EPCR competitions resume in December, but suddenly it feels like our teams are ready to give Europe a proper go.
As for the URC, there are three local teams in the top four at present. Leinster will re-enter the equation later, but I wouldn’t bet my house against there being three local teams in the top four at the end of the league phase of the URC, with Glasgow and Leinster being the only real threats to that hypothesis.
Having the professional club level of the game in this country cooking again will be good for the local rugby ecosystem which, as we are seeing already with some of Rassie’s selections, is in turn also good for the Boks.