A moment of rugby relief

BUSINESS DAY, 17 JULY 2003

THE AEROPLANE TO Cape Town last Saturday morning was a sea of green, but it was a rolling sea, a gently heaving and swelling sea, not the tempest-tossed maelstrom of foam and thunder, breakers and troughs I had been fearing. The passengers were well behaved and for the most part sober, and as much as that pleased me, it also had me worried.

I suppose the subdued mood had something to do with the fact that the cabin crew took one look at the rows of frowning hearties in Springbok jerseys and supporters’ caps and announced that there would be no alcoholic refreshments served that morning. It probably also had something to do with the fact that it was at an hour of the day when last night’s pre-pre-match celebrations were still causing eyelids to droop and bottom lips to quiver. But mostly it was because although this was a planeload of men and women flying across the country to support their national team, it was also a planeload of men and women who were not expecting to have much to cheer about on the flight home.

There was one desultory “Bokke!” as the breakfast trays were passed around, and one misguided fellow in row 7 tried to start a round of “Shosholoza” as we circled Cape Town, but he had misread the mood. I perched in my seat, entertaining myself with the richly creative writing of the Saturday papers, but all the while worrying that the Newlands crowd would be resigned to defeat even before the game began.

Happily, it was not worry well spent. Newlands when I arrived was a cauldron of bubbling willpower. Before the teams ran out you could feel the massed hopes of the crowd forming a kind of electric force field in the air. As we watched the waves of the early Springbok assault breaking upon the Australians, the sound and fury in the stadium felt like a wall of compressed air; when Brent Russell – may his name be venerated and his progeny ever blessed – crossed for the first try the noise became so loud, the air pressure so intense, that it felt like silence, as though we had all been submerged under water.

I was sitting with the good people of the Australian Trade Commission, a one-man oasis amid a small field of optimistic marigold-yellow, and as we settled into our seats I noticed one of the Australians looking around the banked bowl of shouting green. He breathed out slowly. “Crikey,” he said.

As I sat – and frequently stood, and almost as frequently leapt up and down punching the air – watching the match, it occurred to me that the Springboks are just hooking us deeper and deeper. Forget the fabled fickleness of the French – it is South Africa that is the world’s most unpredictable team. Just as we can never, ever be assured that they will put in a decent performance come the weekend, we can never, ever be confident they will not.

As my good friend Jacqui O once complained, being a Springbok supporter is a little like being an abused wife: they can be awful, terrible, they can make us sob ourselves to sleep and wonder why we stick with them. And then afterwards they come to us all ashamed and apologetic and promise that it will never happen again. And we believe them, and give them another chance, and then it happens all over again, and we resolve that this time – this time! – it will be the last chance ever. And then what do they do? They are the perfect gentlemen, and our hearts melt and we are won over once again.

No other rugby fans in the world have this sense of utter uncertainty when their team takes the pitch. I will once more be at the game at Loftus on Saturday. The All Blacks will be a much tougher proposition than Australia, but then again the opposition does not really matter. When the Springboks take the pitch, it is never the opposition we have to worry about.