It’s been a while since 20 000 people attended a game of rugby in Bloemfontein and despite Corné Krige’s chagrin at the reception given his Springbok team on Tuesday night, quite clearly not everyone bought a ticket simply to exercise their right to boo.
As with the Newlands crowd last Saturday, which cheered every time Quinton Davids got the ball and booed when Geo Cronje was in possession, the Bloemfontein crowd was trying to make a point. It was trying to express the idea that respect needs to be earned. This is something that successive Springbok teams and South African Rugby Football Union (Sarfu) officials have failed to grasp.
In a pre-World Cup warm-up in 1995, Kitch Christie’s team only managed to beat Western Province by dint of a last-minute drop-goal from Joel Stransky, an act that was quickly forgotten ,only to resurface in a somewhat more important match two months later.
The Newlands crowd of 1995 was every bit as hostile to the Springboks as the Bloemfontein crowd on Tuesday, but the difference was that no one thought that to be out of place.
In those far off days before Christie achieved sainthood through winning the World Cup, South African rugby was divided along provincial lines, rather than the racial and political lines that allegedly dominate today. Christie had a squad filled with Transvalers and had omitted Tiaan Strauss in order to preserve a fragile peace under Francois Pienaar.
In the circumstances it was inevitable that the Boks would be booed, but there was a significant upside: they won a tight game against a good team in hostile conditions and it made them stronger. When they returned to Newlands a month later to take on Australia in the tournament’s opening game, Christie’s men turned in the best performance of his 14 matches in charge.
The crowd, many of whom had booed the Boks against Western Province, cheered them to the rafters, and the pubs ran out of beer. Christie’s team had earned their respect and learned a lot about their own reserves of mental fortitude. By contrast, Straeuli’s team is still at sixes and sevens because they know that they were booed in Bloemfontein for reasons far removed from petty provincialism.
The South African rugby public is far more diverse and infinitely more intelligent than some people care to believe. In their many hues they all carry built-in bullshit detectors. Advertising campaigns based on fostering blind support cut no ice with these people. You can tell them your blood is green all you like, but you’ll only earn their respect if you actually spill some of it in a noble cause.
To be fair, Straeuli, Krige and the rest of the squad are in a no-win situation. Official dithering over the King inquiry has produced a climate of suspicion and no amount of rhetoric from the pages of Alexander Dumas will clear the tainted air. It is time for this team to put up, shut up and earn our respect on the field of play.
Which brings us neatly back to the match in Bloemfontein. It was scarcely a classic, but the Boks won convincingly and came through relatively unscathed, although the damage to Gcobani Bobo’s knee that forced him off in the first half may yet have severe repercussions, for he will have to be replaced.
Any straw poll conducted on the streets of South Africa this week would name Jean de Villiers as the logical heir to Bobo’s place. Unfortunately logic flew out of the window long ago. Bobo is black and if a replacement is indeed required he will perforce need to be of a similar hue.
In the unique circumstances that this country finds itself, De Villiers, the star of Province’s demolition of the Blue Bulls in Cape Town last week, is not an option. Wayne Julies, a far less impressive performer, is the most likely beneficiary.
The other teams in the World Cup would jump at the chance to get a player of De Villiers’s quality into the mix through the side door, but for South Africa it is simply not an option. Some day we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny, but right now it looks like robbing Peter (or should that be Pieter?) to pay Paul.
A statistics teacher once decided to test the theory that a slice of bread always falls butter-side down. He handed a slice to each of his 30 students with the instruction to throw them in the air. Twenty-nine fell to earth butter-side down, the 30th stuck butter-side up on the ceiling. It is that kind of sickening inevitability that the Springbok camp has to deal with.
It also has to deal with a second successive game — against the Falcons in Springs on Tuesday — where the Boks are likely to be as popular as a man frying sausages in a nudist camp. It is the job of everyone involved in the squad to turn this apparent negative into a positive. Aside from the need to apply more than a little Polyfilla to a porous defence, this team needs to play so well that the people of the East Rand forget that they came to boo and stay to cheer.
Inevitably there will be some collateral damage but the moral of this story is that character is built in adversity, not with advertising campaigns. Get used to it, there’s a World Cup coming.