Tour Manager’s Message
As I write, the eyes of the football world are on South Africa. The newspapers are full of Bafana Bafana and vuvuzelas. England, characteristically, has lost its grip on reality, and its overweening arrogance and hubris have been visited with nemesis and ritual humiliation in the fate of poor Robert Green (yet another hapless goalkeeper in the tradition of Peter Bonetti, David Seaman, Scott Carson, and Paul Robinson) who would have been treated rather better in the press, had he walked onto the pitch without his shorts. All we are waiting for is a TV interview with Glenn Hoddle and Eileen Drewery and a metaphysical deconstruction of karma and its role in Green’s downfall. Mercifully, rugby, apart from the very occasional rush of ‘joke blood’ to the head of a Dean Richards or a Tom Williams, is more grounded. Rugby is serious stuff, and if you think you are any good, there is no testing ground like South Africa to find out.
Until the 1990s South Africa was the most successful rugby nation in test match history, with a positive win-loss ratio over every other rugby nation, including New Zealand. It is a sad fact of life, however, that politics and sport in South Africa have been uncomfortable and unwelcome bed-fellows. Fifteen years of isolation, as a result of united Commonwealth opposition to apartheid, from the Gleneagles Agreement of 1977 to the readmission of South Africa to world rugby in 1992, made readjustment difficult. The game had moved on in the intervening period and, but for the remarkable home triumph in 1995 and the iconic image of Nelson Mandela, resplendent in Francois Pienaar’s No.6 shirt, presenting the captain with the William Webb-Ellis Trophy, South Africa struggled to maintain its ascendancy, with the All Blacks winning their first away test series in 1996, and the Lions matching them (for the first time since 1974) in the following year. A particular challenge at this time was for an essentially white middle-class game to adjust to the new ‘inclusive’ expectations of the Rainbow Nation. A period of success followed with coach, Nick Mallett, and captain, Gary Teichmann, equalling the then existing record of the 1965-9 All Blacks for the longest winning streak in test match rugby (17). In 1999, playing a forward-orientated kicking-game (and what Englishman can forget Jannie de Beer’s five dropped-goals?), the Springboks lost a tense World Cup semi-final to Australia. An exceptionally lean period followed in the early millennium with record defeats to England (53-3), France, Scotland and New Zealand, and a quarter-final exit in the World Cup of 2003. The next few years saw a rebuilding of the team under Jake White, complicated by the demands of ‘transformation’ and the need to redress the racial imbalances in the game, but resulting in World Cup victory in 2007 in the final (15-6) against England. History was made in 2008, when Peter de Villiers was appointed the first ever non-white coach of the Springboks, with 10 non-whites in his squad. 2009 was one of the most successful in the post-apartheid era: by the end of it they had beaten the Lions and were Tri-Nations champions. In the process they added the Freedom Cup (against New Zealand) and the Mandela Challenge Plate (against Australia), two pleasant little book-ends for the William Webb-Ellis Trophy. In November South Africa will have the honour of being the first team to play Ireland at their new home, the Aviva Stadium. This is a measure of the country we are visiting.
Despite, no, rather because of, this unfortunate nexus of sport and politics, it was one of the great privileges of my life to visit South Africa with a touring team in 1996. Few events have made a more powerful impression on me than the visit to Paarl in 1996 and the privilege of being the first white rugby team to play Paulus Joubert, only two years after Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as the country’s first democratically-elected president. We lost 17-21, but it felt like a victory to witness the opposition’s unbridled joy in our defeat. Our captain’s observation that he had never been so pleased to lose a game in his life showed wisdom beyond his years. On the other side of the river, two great rugby playing schools, the Gymnasium and the Boys High School, that same day were knocking eight bells out of each other before a crowd of thousands – but the main act had taken place earlier in the Dal Josephat Stadium where a different kind of history had been made. As I write, in a week’s time, the South Africa 1996 Tour Party are having a reunion dinner. Phil Stoddart, the captain, is returning from Australia, others from less far afield, but they are making a significant effort. We are one fewer now – the baby of the party, Steve Baker, having succumbed many years ago, before his life had properly begun, to a brain tumour – but the need to relive those moments, not just those in Paarl, is profound. We shall remember the awesome quality of much of the rugby: the skill, the athleticism, the power and, above all, the sheer competitiveness of the play. We shall remember the great hospitality, camaraderie and generosity of a sort rarely encountered in this country. We shall remember the many larger-than-life characters who welcomed us - their eccentricities, their passions, their panache. No doubt, we shall also remember our own personal triumphs and disasters, although being British – and overgrown schoolboys at that - we shall take a greater pleasure in reminding one another of the latter, but the trauma of the dropped pass, the missed tackle, the wrong option – all disasters real enough in the moment – the passage of time will have blurred and healed. Let’s hope that Robert Green does not take so long to exorcise his demons! We shall certainly find time to remember Steve, his image perpetually young and lithe among the thinning pates and flabby stomachs of his peers, and we will offer a toast to life, to comradeship, and to absent friends. We shall also toast the tour party of 2010 and hope that they will find reason to come together from distant parts beneath the Tudor beams of the East Wing to share their own memories of Kipling’s ‘two imposters’, triumph and disaster, ‘and treat them just the same’.
Dick Mowbray
