If you wanted to play devil’s advocate it might be argued that South Africa’s triumph in this year’s Tri-Nations was more than a little fortuitous and that, since each of the three teams won their home games and lost away, it was merely treading water.
At no stage in the earlier Tests did the Springboks put a team to the sword. Ireland were beaten as much by Percy Montgomery’s boot as anything else, the Pacific Islanders woke up after half an hour and gave the Boks a scare and even the 50 points piled up against Wales left something of a hollow taste in the mouth.
And yet, by the time John Smit hoisted the Tri-Nations Trophy it was as plain as the nose on Ken Rutherford’s face that this team had within it the seeds of greatness. Sometimes seeds fall on stony ground, but in a month’s time we will know for certain whether Jake White’s Springboks really are something special.
That’s because this is a Grand Slam tour: over the next four Saturdays South Africa will play Wales, Ireland, England and Scotland, and will thereby attempt to become the fifth Springbok team to beat each of the home unions in one tour.
The last time it was achieved, by Avril Malan’s team of 1960/61, a try was still worth three points and the tour lasted four months, not four weeks. Nick Mallett’s tourists of 1998 were the last with a chance to do the Grand Slam and they only fell at the final hurdle, losing 13-7 against England at Twickenham.
That was the match that ended Mallett’s unbeaten run as coach and it transpired that the team beat itself at Twickenham. A power struggle within the camp had seen Bobby Skinstad promoted from super-sub to first-choice number seven flank.
The player Skinstad replaced was André Venter, the iron man from the Free State who had become a talisman for the more experienced members of the side. In the first Test of the tour it was Venter’s late try that saved the Boks’ bacon against Wales at Wembley.
When Venter was dropped a hard core of Boks realised for the first time that no-one was safe, even with a World Cup one season away. A domino effect came into being and by the time the Millennium stadium was complete, six months later, Springbok rugby was at such a low ebb that Wales beat South Africa for the first time in their history.
The difference between then and now is that, while Mallett’s team had peaked and was heading into a trough, White’s Springboks have no idea exactly how good they are. They know that they have a handful of great players and a coach who keeps getting better, but most of the squad have never played a Test in Britain.
At the end of the Tri-Nations, White said that his job was to enthuse the players ahead of the end-of-season tour. On the eve of departure he made the point that this squad may never again be in a position to win a Grand Slam, because these days the International Rugby Board seems to frown on allowing a southern hemisphere side to play all four on one trip.
As a student of the gamem, White will be able to reel off the Springbok teams that have done the Grand Slam, but he would be well advised to remind his youthful squad of the last two southern hemisphere teams to do it (France do it fairly regularly in the Six Nations).
In 1977/78 Graham Mourie’s All Blacks rode roughshod over the best of British. They were a better team by far than the one that lost 3-1 to the Springboks in 1976 and their mighty pack revelled in the kind of soft conditions familiar from Auckland to Dunedin.
But Mourie’s All Blacks were just a great side: they didn’t fundamentally change the way the game of rugby union is played. That was the prerogative of the 1984 Wallabies, the team that established Australia at the forefront of the game, instead of merely the place where touring teams stopped off on their way to New Zealand.
The ’84 Wallabies had a utilitarian pack, but their backs were out of this world. At the start of the tour John Hipwell was at scrumhalf, but by the end a young tyro by the name of Nick Farr-Jones had forced his way into the Test team. The centre partnership was Andrew Slack and another unheralded youngster called Michael Lynagh, while out on the wing was a soufflé-headed wizard: David Campese.
All of these added up to plenty, but they were no more than magician’s apprentices to the finest flyhalf in Wallaby history, Mark Ella. The aborigine genius was short and stocky and utterly uninterested in kicking the ball. The whole back line adopted his short-passing method and they thereby manufactured overlaps in the same wholesale manner that other people make sausages.
There are those who say the Achilles heel of this Springbok side is at flyhalf, where Jaco van der Westhuyzen’s lack of a kicking game will be disastrous on soft fields. In which case White may like to dig out some videos of Ella to show what can be achieved with the hands and hips.
It is asking too much of this team to emulate the ’84 Wallabies, but someday soon we’ll look back on the Grand Slam tour of 2004 and say that’s where it all started. To misquote the bard, by the pricking of my thumbs, something special this way comes.