Australian rugby people can’t understand why South Africa ever plays home Test matches away from Ellis Park. The Wallabies have built a castle in the rarefied Highveld air at the venue where they have not won a Test match since the Ken Catchpole-inspired Wallabies of 1963.
Of course, they’ve only played there twice in the 42 years since then, but let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good story. In fact, the Springboks have lost four times in Johannesburg since readmission in 1992: twice against New Zealand and twice against France.
They would have lost against Australia in 2002, but for a perfectly executed move moments from the end of the Tri-Nations game.
The hooter had sounded and the Boks had taken the ball through six phases, when Bolla Conradie’s short pass found a charging Werner Greeff 20m out.
Greeff broke the defensive wall and scored in the left corner to level the scores, then goaled the conversion to snatch a 33-31 win for Rudolph Straeuli’s team. An exit poll at Ellis Park that evening would have installed the Boks as favourites for the 2003 World Cup, which only goes to show that you should never get carried away with a win over Australia at altitude.
In fact, had it not been for Greeff’s almost posthumous heroics, Straeuli’s side would have made unhappy history by being the first Tri-Nations team to lose four out of four in a season. On such slender threads do reputations rise and fall.
Greeff, for instance, was lauded as the most complete player in South Africa, the flyhalf we had been waiting for since the retirement of Henry Honiball. How are the mighty fallen.
Greeff played fullback in that game, but took the place kicks because of the absence of first-choice flyhalf Andre Pretorius. The latter pulled out and Straeuli was apparently bent on calling up Louis Koen from the Blue Bulls, not much of a flyhalf but a fine place kicker.
Instead the Springbok coach was prevailed upon to select Brent Russell for his one and only Test in his favourite number 10 shirt and the pocket rocket thrilled the crowd throughout a long, tense, but immensely entertaining afternoon.
Fast-forward to a few years later and Russell has been released by current Springbok coach Jake White to play for his province this weekend. Also out of the mix were Lawrence Sephaka and Danie Rossouw, but a training field accident involving CJ van der Linde has thrust Sephaka back into the spotlight.
With Sephaka restored at tighthead, White’s team has six black players in the run-on 15 and three on the bench. This is the kind of inclusiveness that his end-of-year-tour promised last year but failed to deliver, with players such as Jongi Nokwe spending a month holding tackle bags on damp training fields.
White claims to have planned the Johannesburg Test side’s radical revamp from the moment, eight weeks ago, when the squad met for the first time in 2005.
If this is true it is laudable; if not, laughable. Remember that in the darkest days of Straeuli’s tenure the press and public were always eventually batted back by the claim that the coach had a plan. White’s mission now is to prove that he has more than the one plan that foundered so abjectly two weeks ago in Sydney.
The coach is a stubborn man and one of his finest attributes is loyalty to players who have done the job for him in the past. That, allied to his stated aim to stop throwing Springbok caps around like confetti, led him to continue selecting the likes of Marius Joubert and Jaco van der Westhuyzen despite a distinct lack of delivery.
So while this week’s team has a freshness (and inclusiveness) about it that has attracted praise, the acid test will come a fortnight from now when the same two sides meet in the first Tri-Nations match of the season in Pretoria. It is a foregone conclusion that the rested Schalk Burger and Fourie du Preez will return at Loftus, but what of the other hopefuls?
If the centre pairing of Jean de Villiers and Jacque Fourie succeeds, will White have the strength of character to scrap the partnership of Joubert and De Wet Barry that gave last season’s successful Tri-Nations side its midfield mettle?
And, more importantly, will Andre Pretorius be given the same amount of rope that White has extended to Van der Westhuyzen? Two things stand between Pretorius and success at the highest level: a damning injury record and poor decision-making under pressure.
White can do little about the former drawback, but upon his ability to improve the latter rests not just Pretorius’s future, but that of the entire team that Jake built.