STRIKING IT RICH: Covering the Boks after being treated like a cow

AT LEAST THE KRUGER GATE FROGS SHOWED EXCITEMENT

“Bokke, Bokke, Bokke…” To me it was unmistakable. The frogs that created a nightly symphony at my timeshare at Burchell’s Lodge, near the Kruger Gate entry to the Kruger National Park (it is still called that), were in awe of Malcolm Marx and singing their approval.

My colleague Brenden Nel, who had joined me to cover the final Castle Lager Rugby Championship game and the second round of the Vodacom URC from the bush, thought I was stretching it and that it was proof I should go back to diluting my whiskey with water. So did another friend and colleague from the industry, Liam del Carme, who tends to be cynical about these things. But to me it was unmistakable - “Bokke, Bokke, Bokke…”

Which if it was the case was a considerably tuned up version of the excitement generated by the Springboks, meaning the rugby team and not the antelope (we don’t get those here by the way, it’s not arid enough), elsewhere among their support base. You know the Boks are doing well when their supporters believe a 16 point lead, which it was quite late in the game, is too close for comfort. And it is a much improved Argentina they are playing against.

In the end it was just two points, but the Boks gifted Argentina the converted try that brought them back to within nine and the last one was a consolation effort when the game was already won and lost. Had Cheslin Koble found a teammate with the speculative pass that was intercepted the Boks might well have scored and then it would have been a winning margin approximating the more than 30 points in Durban the week before.

The rather muted response to the Bok win, with the narrowness of it on the scoreboard even drawing comments that suggested they were short of being satisfied from the Boks themselves, is an indication that five weeks can be a sod of a long time in rugby. It was about five weeks ago it was all doom and gloom after the Boks lost to New Zealand at Eden Park. Now the expectation is that they don’t just win every game, they win it in style, or we won’t be satisfied.

That is the expectation the Boks will have to learn to live with going forward now that they’re inhabiting a different stratosphere to the one they inhabited before.

PARIS GAME TOO BIG NOT TO GO ALL IN

We will know in the coming weeks what Rassie Erasmus intends to do with his selection, but while the wise course of action might be what I suggested a few weeks ago, there has been a subsequent adjustment to my thinking when it comes to what should be a seismic clash between the world’s best teams in Paris in early November.

The World Rugby Rankings don’t reflect that the French are up with the Boks as the standout nation, but for my money they are. They are the only country that can boast anything near the rugby depth that this country does. Anything can happen in a World Cup knockout game and let’s not forget that the Boks won the last global showpiece event by winning three successive playoff games by a solitary point. They very nearly exited the tournament at the hands of a very average England team.

But if you want to talk about a threat, France rank above France, Ireland, England and, because some people genuinely think they may be good enough to challenge at their own World Cup by 2027, Australia.

That their ranking doesn’t reflect that is mainly down to their coach Fabian Galthie’s decision to send an under-strength squad to their recent three match series against the All Blacks in New Zealand. They lost 3-0 but came close in two of the games, thus reflecting the options Galthie has at his disposal. By some reckonings it wasn’t even a France second string team, but a third string.

Galthie made his selection with the tough schedule faced by his players in mind, and Bok coach Erasmus is in charge of a playing group that, because of the 12 month South African season, is even more physically and mentally taxed than the French are. And if he selected his team for the November tour around that consideration, and he wouldn’t be the first Bok coach to do it as Jake White did it in 2006, I’d understand.

Given that the franchises still pay a significant proportion of the Bok player salaries, Erasmus shouldn’t always rely on the franchise coaches to make the necessary sacrifices around resting the Bok players. Erasmus should take on some of that load, and he’s created enough depth to do it.

But for many reasons, and not just because it is the southern champions against the Six Nations champions, therefore European champions, the game against France has become massive. So too has the meeting with Ireland in Dublin later in the tour. Aviva Stadium is a venue where the Boks haven’t won in a sod of a long time. So it needs an all in approach, although resting some key players who may need it wouldn’t be a bad idea and the Boks probably have enough depth to ride it.

MARX WAS MY MVP

Talking of resting, there wasn’t much rest for Malcolm Marx during the international season. The hooker was the one constant presence in the Bok starting team almost throughout, and while in the early stages of the Championship I thought he was a little short of a gallop, possibly because he was carrying an injury, he was excellent over the last few weeks.

To my mind it was as much his departure from the field as the intercept try that coincided with it that brought Argentina back a bit into the game at Twickenham. Marx was the most influential player before that. Which is not to say I disagree with those who say Pieter-Steph du Toit is the best rugby player in the world. PSTD is the best. No argument. Just that Marx is the one player the Boks currently can’t do without.

It may sound like a funny thing to say when the Boks won the last World Cup final with a player who had played mostly flank for a decade deputising at hooker, and with Marx having been ruled out of the tournament at an early stage. But the succession plan for Marx must be one thing that keeps Erasmus awake at night, and you can tell that by how little rotation there has been when it comes to the No 2 jersey.

From an age viewpoint, Marx will still be up with it at the next World Cup, but the progress of Jan-Hendrik Wessels, who in my view is the next cab off the rank at hooker, will be closely followed over the next year. As will that of Marnus van der Merwe and some on the outside looking in, such as Bulls hooker Johan Grobbelaar and the Stormers’ Andre-Hugo Venter. Both have shown promising form in the early stages of the URC.

ACKERMANN FACES INTERESTING DILEMMA

Mention of Wessels as a hooker option cues the subject of the enviable dilemma faced by new Bulls coach Johan Ackermann. He will be losing Wilco Louw next season when the Ceres farmer returns to his old team, the Stormers, but for now he has a ridiculous surfeit of riches. Grobbelaar has been outstanding, but with Gerhard Steenekamp now back from his injury, Wessels may have to challenge for the No 2 jersey. And the Bulls also still have that superb finisher, Akker van der Merwe, on their books.

KEPLER SUMMED UP BOK PROBLEM YEARS AGO


He wasn’t talking about the Springboks, but about the Proteas team he captained at the time, but Kepler Wessels may have been spot on about the challenge faced by Rassie Erasmus when he spoke about the occasional inconsistency of his team more than three decades ago.

It will be recalled that when South Africa made her return to international cricket there was an immediate impact made following the initial feeling out ODI series in India under the captaincy of Clive Rice. The Proteas thrashed Australia in the first match they ever played in a Cricket World Cup - and it was played in Australia. They went on to be unlucky losers in a semifinal that changed the way that the sport dealt with rain interruptions. Hello Duckworth-Lewis.

And yet while they frequently surprised everyone by how well they managed their return at both test and ODI level, there were also fairly frequent blowouts. Which prompted the words I remember from Kepler: “You have to understand that while there is a lot of talent in this team, international cricket is still new to the players and that will mean there will be inconsistency for a few years.”

The Boks aren’t new to international rugby, but they are on a growth curve not unlike the one that Kepler’s team was on all those years ago when it comes to bedding in a transformed approach that in time could make them unbeatable but for now, because it is high risk and high reward, might mean there are a few blips in the short term.

KIWIS THE LAST STUMBLING BLOCK TO GLOBAL SEASON

Details of the tour that will go with the Rivalry Series between the Springboks and All Blacks will be made known shortly, but there is one detail that hits me as an obvious drawback - while the franchise opposition the Kiwis will face should be strong, if the games are played in August surely they will be played out of season for local franchise players?

While the Boks will still be playing then because they are on a non-stop conveyor belt, the month of August should be when the rank and file players are just starting out on their conditioning and preparation for the following season, which will kick off at the end of September. How are they going to fit a plum and tough game against the All Blacks into their off-season?

Fortunately this may be a temporary problem because there are signs that the move towards a much needed global season might be happening. Australia have made it known they will fit in if the Rugby Championship is rescheduled from its current August and September window to March to coincide with the timing of the Six Nations.

Of course they had to do that because they want the Championship to continue, and at the moment both South Africa and New Zealand might need that competition less than the Wallabies and Pumas do. Already it appears that the Championship will be suspended next year to accommodate the SA/NZ series and, riveting as the most recent one was, it will become less of an annual event.

Argentina, who have the bulk of their top players playing in the northern hemisphere, will be keen to play the Championship in March too, so it is only now New Zealand that stand in the way. The Kiwis have apparently been the main stumbling block to the inception of a global season for some time now, but they are becoming isolated in their quest to stick with the traditional southern and northern seasons and my money says that it is now inevitable that in time they will fall in line.

And it will be a good thing too because the current situation faced by South Africa, where the Boks are playing the Championship when the northern opponents they face at club level are resting, and playing URC and the European games when their southern opponents are resting over Christmas, is ridiculous.

LAST GAMES BROUGHT PERSPECTIVE ON WALLABIES

I was accused of being a bit negative about the Wallabies during their series against the British and Irish Lions. I felt the Lions win wasn’t that great an achievement because they were just playing against Australia. Then came the Johannesburg test, where they scored 38 unanswered points against the Boks, and suddenly there was some egg on the face.

But while acknowledging that the Wallabies have undeniably improved under the coaching of Joe Schmidt, and have an identity now whereas they had no identity under the coaching of Eddie Jones, the last two games of the Championship have brought a different perspective on the Aussies to the one that was building around them back in August.

Two successive defeats to a not particularly good All Black team left them second last in the Championship, with two wins in six. Yes, an improvement, but they were lucky to beat Argentina in the first game in Townsville, and could easily have ended last. They may be getting some League stars back before the World Cup, but anyone who thinks they are real contenders for global supremacy at this point is being fanciful.

FELT LIKE A COW

I travelled to where I am now from northern Zululand last week via Eswatini and am pleased to report that the passport control process at both ends is still as seamless as it was when I last made the transit to Mpumalanga through that country in 2014.

The only out of the ordinary process that confronted me came in a roadblock encountered about an hour’s drive into the country. I came across a police roadblock and the focus wasn’t on whether I had been drinking or on my drivers licence, but on a request to walk through a tray of water.

“Please make contact with the water,” was the command. I felt like cattle must feel when they are sent through a dipping trough. Well okay, that’s a major exaggeration, and it certainly didn’t put me out like it might Molly the Moo Cow.

NOT QUITE SPRINGBOKKEN BUT NOT RHINOSTEREN EITHER

There happened to be a bus of foreign tourists also going through customs at the exit from Zululand near Golela. I couldn’t help but overhear their excited conversations about their experiences of Africa thus far.

Clearly they had visited some private reserve where there wasn’t an overabundance of big game because one of the conversations went like this:

“Have you seen any game yet?”

“Yes, we were really excited. We saw an impala. That was our first encounter with an African antelope.”
Assuming they were going to spend time in one of the Swazi reserves, like Royal Hlane, which you drive through on the national road and encounter a road sign warning cyclists and pedestrians to watch out for lions and elephants, and then Kruger, the words that went through my mind were “You ain’t seen nothing yet”.

In the Kruger impala are known by the guides as “the MacDonalds of the bush”, mostly because every predator wants to eat them but also because they are so plentiful. They are behind every anthill and tuft of grass. If my American friend (I think he was American) could get excited about seeing one impala, I fear the excitement he might feel in the Kruger might just be the end of him (he was old enough to have a dickey heart).

Of course if he was heading to the Kgalagadi instead it would be springbok, and not impala, he would be getting excited about. Foreigners getting excited by Springboks? It didn’t happen often in the past, but the new blend to the game the team that plays with the leaping Bok as its emblem is moving towards is going to change that.

The excellent Afrikaans rugby writer Louis de Villiers once wondered why Paul Roos, when he arrived with his South African team in the UK in 1906, told the local journalists “You can call us Springbokken”. At the time the Boks were playing a style of rugby that Louis felt would be more suitable to a request to “call us rhinosteren”. That’s changed, although if you looking for any likeness between Pieter-Steph or Eben Etzebeth with a pronking springbok you will be wasting your time.

So which animal then? Well, the honey badger, or the ratel as they call them in another language, has a proper strut about it. It might be a bit small, but so is a springbok, and after an encounter in a camping site a few years ago they are the one animal I am properly scared of.