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Andy Capostagno
At the final of the 1991 Rugby World Cup there was a small group of people in green and gold shirts holding a banner which read, “The Springboks; the real world champions”. On that bright winter’s day at Twickenham, when Nick Farr-Jones held aloft the William Webb Ellis trophy, such bombast from the pariahs of world sport seemed grossly out of place.
And yet, when the 1995 World Cup began, South Africa beat Australia in the opening game, setting them on course for victory in the final against New Zealand, a result which set many to wondering what might have happened had the Springboks been involved in the first two World Cups.
The likelihood is that they would have had a better chance in 1987 than 1991, with a team which included a string of greats including Naas Botha, Uli Schmidt, Danie Gerber and Carel du Plessis. In 1986 the Springboks beat the New Zealand Cavaliers 3-1 with a team which included all of those, plus the giant lock forward Schalk Burger.
Burger remembered what it felt like to be on the outside looking in. He said: “We had become used to watching tests from abroad and to the idea that we would not be able to play any on South African soil. Watching the 1987 World Cup was great, but when it came to the final I had a hollow feeling inside. I had played in a World XV the previous year with guys who were now on the screen. After those games we said goodbye and I went back to play provincial rugby, but they had the World Cup to look forward to.”
By 1991 the great Springbok side of the mid 1980s had been fragmented, but Schmidt, Botha and Gerber would still have featured in any genuinely representative world team. It must have made it that much worse for the lost generation that less than a year after the Twickenham showpiece, South Africa was back playing true Test rugby on home soil.
The years of isolation had taken their toll and it took some time before the Springboks were genuinely competitive against the best teams in the world. And just when it seemed they had turned the corner, with a series defeat in New Zealand which could easily have been won with a reliable goal kicker, coach Ian McIntosh was dismissed and the team had to effectively start from scratch with less than a year to go before their World Cup debut.
Fortunately for South Africa, Kitch Christie, the man who was appointed to take over from McIntosh, was an ideal choice. Christie realised that there wasn’t too much wrong with the playing personnel or the on-field tactics developed under Mac, and concentrated instead on getting the players truly fit and building a starting 15 which believed in itself.
The process began on tour in Britain in 1994, but despite success in all the Tests played, the team was only three-quarters finalised when the 1995 season began. For instance Joel Stransky, the fly-half who would play a vital role in the campaign, did not feature in the British Tests, languishing in a midweek team which lurched from one poor performance to the next.
But by the time the tournament began, Stransky had forced his way in and in order to accommodate him, Christie moved Hennie le Roux, his flyhalf in Britain, to inside centre, where his partnership with Japie Mulder quickly developed into part of the glue which held the side together.
The 26-man squad was told at once who was in the coach’s first team and who in the second. Transvaal scrum-half Johan Roux was one who fell into the latter category, but found that it did not affect his game.
He said: “Kitch made everyone believe in themselves. I was in the squad, but he told me clearly that Joost [van der Westhuizen] was his number one scrum-half and he did the same with all the rest of the squad who were not his first choices. All the guys who were second fiddle knew exactly where they stood and that was very important. Not only did it let us know where we stood, but it gave the 15 who ran on to the field absolute confidence.”
And at the end of the day it was a tournament all about confidence. Written off as no-hopers before the opening game, the Springboks gave their best display of the whole World Cup against the holders from Australia. Christie’s back-room boys had done their homework and targeted David Campese as a weak link in the Wallaby armoury. The team carried out the tactic to perfection and Campese was never again the player who lit up the 1991 tournament.
The other two group matches against Romania and Canada contained plenty of incident, but none of the spectacle of the opening day at Newlands. That came in the quarter-final at Ellis Park against Western Samoa when Chester Williams wrote his name into the record books with four tries and Andr Joubert broke his hand in one of the many Samoan tackles which had little to do with the laws of the game.
Christie showed his human side when told of Joubert’s break, prepared to do without one of his stars, and then found that the team ethic had seeped into the very bones of his players. In the days ahead of the semi-final with France in Durban, Joubert travelled daily to Pretoria to sit in a decompression chamber, and a special glove of the type used by Irish hurling players was despatched to give him some protection.
In the monsoon conditions of the King’s Park semi-final Joubert covered himself in glory and in the dying moments lock forward Kobus Wiese entered the realm of legend as the Springbok pack prepared to scrum down on their own line against the desperate French. He said to tight- head prop Balie Swart, a schoolboy companion from Paarl Gymnasium: “You can go up, you can go down, or you can go sideways, but you’re not coming back here.”
Swart, and the rest of the tight five, did their job. South Africa were in the final at the first time of asking, and from there, 120 minutes of pulsating rugby notwithstanding, it was plain sailing. If that sounds ridiculous then consider the fact that South Africa had been given no chance in their first World Cup and that, therefore, being in the final was reward in itself.
Victory after extra time against New Zealand was the kind of triumph against all odds which makes people watch sport in the first place. It owed something to home advantage and to a certain bloody- mindedness in the national character, but it was more about a particular team at a particular time and place. To recreate such a thing in the 1999 World Cup is the almost impossible task which Nick Mallett’s team has now to confront.