Ken Borland

Following their disappointment in the Rainbow Cup final, Bulls coach Jake White has had to carefully manage not only his players’ morale but also their bodies, with the team getting over the first of two Currie Cup hurdles in six days with their tight 32-27 win over the tricky Pumas in Pretoria at the weekend.

White said he knew his team were always going to be severely tested by the Pumas, who are fired up after not being involved in the Rainbow Cup and starting the Currie Cup with a bonus point hammering of the Lions. The Bulls, on the other hand, are tired, according to their coach. And they now have to travel to Bloemfontein to take on the Free State Cheetahs on Wednesday.

“Considering we had to fly home this week from Italy, it was long travel and we are tired, and I expected the team to be a bit flat. But we played really nicely, we kept the ball and built some phases. I would have liked it to have been easier after leading 25-10, but you can never underestimate the Pumas – they are a good side with lots of time to prepare for this match.

“So I am very happy to get five points and the guys had to dig deep. It was always going to be tough and we knew the Pumas would come hard, everyone wants to beat us. Unfortunately we let them slip back into the game at 25-10, but overall we’ve got to be happy. And it doesn’t get any easier, last year we lost to the Cheetahs away, so we know how tough that match will be and we need to do a lot of planning,” White said.

While the Bulls’ doctors were yet to examine Gio Aplon when he spoke, White said he feared the worst for the veteran Springbok who hobbled off the field just 25 minutes into his first start for the side.

“Gio really wanted to be a part of the team and it’s really unfortunate what happened. But we are playing so much rugby, week after week, and there are no easy fixtures in South Africa so the attrition rate is big. Gio was always here to help as a senior player because our backline is very young and we needed someone older and wiser. He knew the risk but he wanted to be part of it.

“He’s a fantastic person and a wonderful rugby player, he should have played 100 times for the Springboks, and you don’t want it to eventually end like that. But his chances are slim because he’s done his knee again and it’s the same knee. Sometimes you don’t get the ideal ending, in sport you can’t always write the script you want to have,” White said.

Temba Bavuma can complain with righteous indignation over the misfortune that saw him miss the entire Test series against the West Indies, but he can have no complaints over the quality of preparation his T20 side will be getting against a home team packed with giants of the shortened version of the game.

The five-match T20 series starts at St George’s in Grenada on Saturday and the West Indies have T20 legends Kieron Pollard, Chris Gayle, Andre Russell and Dwayne Bravo in their squad. It will be a daunting challenge for Bavuma, who will actually lead his team out on to the field for the first time in a T20, having missed the series against Pakistan due to injury.

That bad luck with injuries followed him to the Caribbean, where he was on the sidelines of the memorable Test triumph due to first a hip problem and then a dislocated finger while training for the second Test. So Bavuma will certainly be eager for the contest.

“As a team we’ve had various discussions on the type of cricket we want to play and now we have a chance to test that against a very strong outfit, the West Indies obviously being one of the favourites for the World Cup later this year. We get the chance to test our skills against their’s and that should give us a clearer picture of what needs to be done.

“It’s going to be a good measure, it will show us where our standard is in our game. We don’t have confirmation yet of where the World Cup will be played, so we are just looking at the challenge against the West Indies now. We want to play our best cricket in these conditions and they might just happen to be similar to what is found on the subcontinent,” Bavuma said on Friday.

Half-a-dozen of the players who no doubt quaffed some celebratory drinks following their leading roles in the Test series triumph are likely to play in the first T20, while Bavuma and spinners Tabraiz Shamsi and George Linde were also part of the Test squad. So there is plenty of feel-good continuity in the Proteas camp.

“The Tests went exceptionally well and the outcome of that was momentum and confidence. Although this is a different format, quite a few of the players were involved in the Tests. It’s only natural that we want to continue as is, carrying the same language through, with most of the guys being the same. The discussions Dean Elgar and I have had about how to take the team forward obviously bore fruit.

“We’ll only finalise our plans after practice today because it has been raining and the weather is a bit of a concern. We haven’t had an opportunity yet to look at the pitch, but it’s fantastic we’ve got options when it comes down to spin, all-rounders or bolstering the batting,” Bavuma said.

Probably only the most ardent of South African rugby fans will know the name Dugald Macdonald, but he is Springbok number 470 having first slipped the famous Green and Gold jersey over his head in a third-floor room of the President Hotel in Sea Point, on 7 June 1974, while a typical Cape Town cold front splattered rain on to the balcony outside.

Macdonald would wear the jersey that had captured his imagination only once in a Test match, and that was actually a fortnight later when he played in the second Test against the British Lions at Loftus Versfeld. That’s because he was a reserve for the first Test at Newlands, and in those days the replacements sat in the stadium because the ‘bench’ was hardly ever used.

In a disastrous 3-0 series loss for the Springboks, he was destined to become one of the unfortunate one-Test wonders as the national selectors panicked and chose 36 different players for the four Tests, the final match in Johannesburg being drawn. According to veteran rugby writer John Bishop, who covered the entire tour, “Dugald should have been there from start to finish, he was one hell of a player. One of those guys who were simply forgotten about in the chaos of the 1974 tour, a powerful number eight with excellent ball skills. He should have been a Bok great”.

Macdonald has just released a book about the whole experience – the series being one of the most traumatic in South African rugby – called Ja-Nee. It is an engrossing look into the past, a study in how the mentality of Springbok rugby was built and how those attitudes still influence it today, but as with all great writing, it also brings applications and warnings for the future.

And it’s not just about rugby either. It provides a fascinating snapshot of White South African life in the 1970s. It is evocative, humorous and thought-provoking all at the same time.

The sun was shining brightly on that midwinter’s day in Pretoria, but Macdonald makes a decent argument for the Springboks not so much being panicky as arrogant. They were convinced that the Lions could not possibly be better than them and a few changes would sort out their scrum and allow them to dominate possession.

It’s a recurring story in our rugby: Back in 1992 when we returned from isolation and expected to still be better than Australia and New Zealand because “the Currie Cup is the strongest competition in the world” and instead lost both Tests comfortably. And then just last week the Bulls travelled from Pretoria to Italy, everyone back home confident that they would be returning from their jaunt with the Rainbow Cup, only to be played off the park by Benetton Treviso.

When South African rugby retreats into the laager mentality, we tend to become dangerously insular whenever we have been cut off from international trends.

Macdonald was not your typical Springbok of the 1970s, he was a city boy, schooled in Cape Town, he was an Oxford Blue and also played for Parma in Italy and Toulouse in France. Some might say paranoid 1970s South Africa was never likely to give him many more than one Test cap.

This broader world view has allowed him to identify an over-reliance on physicality as being a possible albatross around the necks of the current world champions, who have not played since outmuscling England in the World Cup final in Japan in November 2019. While the Springboks have been inactive, the rest of the world has been plotting.

“If we understood the roots of South African rugby then we’ll know why physicality has actually been responsible for many of our defeats. I fear we are winding up for another one because physicality is all the Lions are talking about. But if we don’t have technique and lucidity, physicality can only get you so far.

“Whenever we have just played inklim rugby it has been the beginning of the end, it’s been a problem down the years, and the same thing is growing again. Physicality is great at the right time and in the right place, but so much thought needs to go into it otherwise it’s helluva easy to get carried away. Fortunately we have really good leaders in the game now,” Macdonald told me.

*Ja-Nee is published by Flyleaf Publishing and is widely available in bookstores and online.

There remains a lingering perception that those Springboks based in Japan are somehow playing a brand of rugby that lacks physicality, but centre Jesse Kriel says it’s not as if he’s just been parking off playing touch rugby over the last year.

The 27-year-old plays for the Canon Eagles in the Top League, helping them to the quarterfinals, and is now looking forward to contributing fully to the Springboks’ effort to beat the British and Irish Lions.

“There’s always a lot of questions about the physicality in Japan, but there are a lot of foreign players there now and they are quite physical. There are a lot of Tongans and other Islands people playing there and they are not small! The tempo is quite quick as well. But no domestic competition matches Test match intensity and we’re getting a taste of the intensity we need at training this week,” Kriel said.

While Kriel has consistently inked himself into all Springbok squads since the 2015 World Cup, he had the ill-fortune to get injured during South Africa’s 2019 triumph, but he says he does not feel like the Lions tour is a case of unfinished business for him.

“I gave everything I could at the last World Cup up to the time I got injured and I still very much felt part of the team and was able to contribute. So I don’t feel like I have unfinished business, this is a different series and tour. The make-up of the Lions team is such that they are the best players from each country in Britain and Ireland, so every guy is world-class and we know what they bring as individuals.

“But all the young guys coming through for us shows that our grassroots structures are working and this is a great opportunity for them to showcase what they can do. And the youngsters have great guys around to learn off, just look at Morne and Francois Steyn. They do the basics really well, they don’t make mistakes and we can all look up to them and try and replicate that,” Kriel said.