The Springboks have lost their last two matches by wide margins and when they last played the All Blacks, they conceded no fewer than seven tries. In their long and sometimes distinguished history, they have never won a Test in Dunedin — the venue for this week’s Tri-Nations encounter.
Is it any wonder, then, that we have spent the last week looking backwards instead of forwards?
The allegations of foul play levelled by Australia after last week’s Brisbane Test have provided a handy smokescreen for yet another dismally lacklustre performance by Rudolf Straeuli’s men. They fought hard until half-time and succeeded in making Australia look like an extremely ordinary side, just as they did in Cape Town a month ago.
But a passage of play early in the second half set the tone for the rest of the match. Joe van Niekerk rescued a movement that was going backwards and charged into the Wallaby forwards. He wrestled the ball to the ground on halfway and the back line sniffed action.
All was well until the time came for Louis Koen to throw a long cut-out pass. He intended to bypass De Wet Barry and give space to the outside backs to attack down the left. Instead, through a combination of faulty alignment and poor skills, the ball sailed behind the backs and bounced kindly for Mat Rogers, who promptly scored the first try of the game.
Good sides put such incidents behind them, regroup and promise to do it right next time. This is not a good side and the consequent deterioration in their performance spoke volumes about the paper-thin veneer of con-fidence the players carry with them.
It was, therefore, akin to kicking a man when he is down when Eddie Jones marched into the press con-ference and called the Springboks ‘a disgrace for international rugbyâ€. If he was talking in terms of their rugby-playing ability, he might have had a point. But he was referring to their penchant for foul play.
The days of put up and shut up are apparently gone. Jones seemed to have so little faith in the power of the judicial process to identify and punish the guilty that he brought hooker Brendan Cannon with him to tell his gory tale of assault.
Of course, Jones lives in a country where it is okay for rugby players to take drugs as long as no one finds out. It is also okay to boast of landing a punch on the Springbok captain, as long as the cameras didn’t see it.
Ben Tune has done both of the above and would have been in the Wallaby team on Saturday were it not for a long-term injury.
There seems little doubt that Jones’s diatribe contributed to the lengthy bans incurred by Bakkies Botha and Robbie Kempson. Botha received eight weeks’ suspension for ‘attacking the face†of Cannon, while Kempson got four weeks for what looked the worse of the two indiscretions — a late and high tackle on Toutai Kefu.
The fact of the matter is that South African players tend to get the short straw more often than not in these kinds of situations. It is even okay for former All Blacks captain Taine Randell to resort to cheap racism in describing them. ‘The Afrikaners want to bully you, so you have to get into them first — before they get into you,†is what he had to say to the media when the Boks arrived in New Zealand this week.
Randell might well have said the same thing about the Tongan, Samoan and Fijian players who keep the All Blacks team strong, but if he had he’d have been lynched. It really is tiresome to see the crude stereotyping South African players are subject to wherever they go. Both Randell and Jones are guilty of stoking the fires of racial resentment. It’s as though the past 10 years didn’t happen.
It is, in fact, almost a decade since the Boks went on tour to Britain and Ireland, carrying the taint of Johan le Roux’s 19-month ban for biting Sean Fitzpatrick. The British media spent the first week of tour writing stories about inhuman monsters invading their shores and in an effort to get someone to write about rugby, the then-Bok PR officer gave the media unprecedented access to the players.
Slowly the British media began to temper their stories with a few facts, but their earlier caricatures informed the crowd at the Gnoll when the Boks played their third match of the tour against Neath.
Halfway through the second half a mass brawl erupted, involving 28 of the 30 players on the field. The Boks went on to win and, as the crowd filed out, the press box was deluged with mucus and threats of violence.
The abuse in the press and on the streets ended a few days later when the Boks put Swansea, the club champions of Wales, to the sword in a display of total rugby that made everyone forget about violence and remember why it is we play rugby union in the first place.
The challenge facing Straeuli’s men is to emulate Kitch Christie’s side. They don’t have to beat the All Blacks this weekend.
They don’t even have to keep the score respectable. They just have to remind us exactly why they get paid to play the game in the first place.