BOK TWICKENHAM RETROSPECTIVE: Tears, skullduggery…and some espionage

November 13, 2024

It was November 1998. Dark clouds hung over Twickenham, but it was a reflection of the mood of the visiting team, and not the hosts. What was supposed to be South Africa’s record breaking day had ended in heart-break, with England winning a dour game 13-7.

It was the end of a year much like this one has mostly been. The Springboks had won the Tri-Nations. They’d continued a run of success that had effectively started in Carel du Plessis’ last game in charge, when Gary Teichmann’s team had beaten Australia 61-22 at Loftus, but which gained proper momentum in Nick Mallett’s first tour in charge later in 1997.

There were 17 consecutive wins to equal the world record set by an All Black team of previous vintage. One more win in the game at Twickenham would be enough to make the record South Africa’s.

Mallett will look back now, with the benefit of the perspective given by a long view of things, and regret he didn’t do on that tour what one of his players in that squad, Rassie Erasmus, has done this year in his role as Bok coach. Rotate. The word wasn’t as in vogue then as it is now, but the All Blacks started to do it with their selections on November tours not long after that.

Mallett had enough depth in his squad on that tour to do that. Players like Robbie Fleck and Corne Krige were in the midweek team and chomping at the bit to play test rugby, as they did the following year. Rugby in the UK was also weaker than it is now.

The England game was the tough one of the tour, the rest of the teams were pretty second rate, with the exception of Wales, who pushed the Boks at Wembley in the opening test of that tour.

Old timers might remember that game at Wembley, with the game held there because the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff was under construction, as the day that the Boks were in all sorts of trouble against a team they’d posted 96 points against at Loftus earlier that year but were saved by a bearded streaker who held up play for several minutes and broke the Welsh momentum by proving particularly adept at evading the tackle attempts of the Wembley security personnel.

Was he a South African helping out the Bok cause?

NO STREAKER TO SAVE BOKS THIS TIME

There was no streaker to save the Boks in the last game of their tour, and had such a thing been planned, the weather would have anyway forced a change of plan. A tired Bok team slumped to defeat and the mood of the thousands of South African expats, who turn Twickenham Bok games into such a serious event, was summed up when I went into the pub at the Stoop (Harlequins Club) adjacent to Twickenham an hour or two after the game.

As always after a test match, it was heaving. There was hardly any space to stand without suffocating. It was also hard not to overhear conversations. A young South African lady was standing at the bar when I was trying to order a drink, and she was in obvious distress, with tears rolling down her face. She was arguing on her cell-phone with what was probably her boyfriend, somewhere else in London.

“Listen, baby, I’m not looking for shit with you, but that was a really stupid question,” she wailed. “The Boks lost today, so how the hell do you think I might be feeling right now?”

As I wrote in my book about the post-isolation Springbok coaches, The Poisoned Chalice, that was an example of the passion of the support for the Boks, which often veers beyond the sensible.

It is understandable though why England games are so serious for SA expats living in London – they have to go to work on Monday and face the barbs of their colleagues when the team loses. And while they don’t have to pick up the newspapers to read the crowing reports that accompany any England win, they are hard to avoid.

Mallett, who had been coach for 14 months by then and had only just suffered his first defeat, was brought up to date with the reality of the expectations of the public back home when, at the post-match press conference “You will get hammered when you get back home”.

Which he was because success creates expectation, something Erasmus is probably well aware of as he faces up to Saturday’s big game of the tour at the same Twickenham venue.

INSIDE STORY THAT SHOULD IRK MALLETT

There is an inside story to that defeat though that should irk Mallett if he doesn’t already know it. John Mitchell, later to become the All Black coach and now coaching the England woman’s team, was the England assistant coach to Clive Woodward back then. In his book “Mitch: The Real Story”, which I co-wrote with him, Mitchell related how Woodward was a bit ahead of his time when it came to getting tabs on the opposition.

“Unfortunately for the Boks, they revealed some of their plays for the match during the captain’s practice at Twickenham the day before,” wrote Mitchell.

“I say it was unfortunate because Clive Woodward enjoyed sitting in the security box at Twickenham when opposition teams trained, and he was there that day. I wasn’t present, but the information that came back from their captain’s run was that Bob Skinstad would play offf the back and there would be another play just off that. Perhaps it was because he knew what he got away with that Clive became so security conscious later.

“Sure enough, early in the game, around the halfway line, the Boks tried some lineout moves that we had spied on and had been prepared for, and they weren’t able to make the advantage line. That gave England great confidence and set us on path to our victory.”

That was 26 years ago and no one will care about it that much now, but if the media got a whiff of what Mitchell referred to at the time, it would have become a great controversy to rival the many that have shrouded the memory of Twickenham clashes between England and the Boks over the years.

JAW BROKEN BY FRIENDLY FIRE

Such as the aftermath of England’s humiliating 53-3 win at the venue in 2002, a result rivalled by the 57-0 in Albany in 2017 and the 49-0 in Brisbane in 2006 as South Africa’s most humbling experience on the rugby field.

The game itself had enough obvious controversy. The path to the one-sidedness of the England triumph was effectively paved by the clumsy late tackle that Bok lock Jannes Laubschagne executed in the 10th minute to prompt Kiwi referee Paddy O’Brien to show him a red card.

What was less starkly evident was the events that led to days of backlash against the Boks afterwards for their approach to the rest of that game. Krige was honest enough to admit it later – he had an inexperienced team under his command, and when he looked at his teammates after the sending off, he saw the whites of their eyes.

They were deer caught in the headlights. He resolved then that even if England were to win the game comfortably, which was already inevitable, he would ensure the England players would know from their sore bodies they were in a game. The Boks went out to hurt the England players, although one of the most hurt players turned out to be Bok flyhalf Andre Pretorius, who was hurt by friendly fire and no less a teammate than the captain itself.

Not that Krige was completely aware of what he had done when he sat in front of the media at the post-match press conference and reacted with incredulity when his team was accused of dirty play.

Referring to the broken jaw suffered by Pretorius, he responded: “Do you think we would take out our own player?”

Krige later discovered that the cameras had picked up a haymaker he had aimed at an English player and missed. Instead, it had landed flush on his teammate’s sweet spot. It was just one of several incidents the then SARFU chief executive Rian Oberholzer had to defend when both the media and what was then the IRB, now World Rugby, started studying the Sky footage of the game.

IGNORING FARRELL’S HIGH HIT SAVED ENGLAND

Of course though it wasn’t always the Boks who were guilty of skullduggery, and the first time Erasmus took the Boks to Twickenham, in 2018, the match was marred by the high hit from Owen Farrell on Bok centre Andre Esterhuizen in the dying seconds of the game.

It wasn’t the first or last time that particular player was guilty of such a thing, and the evidence was clear when you watched the replays, but somehow the referee let it go and didn’t award the penalty.

The Boks were trailing by less than three points, and the penalty would have been in a kickable position, with the steady nerve of Handre Pollard on the field to kick it.

The last time the Boks were at Twickenham there wasn’t any noted skullduggery from either side, just a great win from the Boks that was built as much around the X-factor of Damian Willemse and Kurt-Lee Arendse as it was their usual power game.

The upshot of that game, which was won comprehensively by the visitors, was that England finally dumped Eddie Jones as their coach. It was less than a year out from the next World Cup, so it was a big call to make, but the ease with which the Boks stamped their authority on the game left the RFU with no choice.

There hasn’t been quite the same level of bitterness around Steve Borthwick’s reign as England coach as there was around the latter part of the Jones era, but the current England coach nonetheless faces a similar kind of pressure as Saturday’s game approaches.

Springbok post-isolation record against England at Twickenham

1992 – Lost 33-18

1995 – Won 24-14

1997 – Won 29-11

1998 – Lost 13-7

2000 – Lost 25-17

2001 – Lost 29-9

2002 – Lost 53-3

2004 – Lost 32-16

2006 – Lost 23-21

2006 – Won 25-14 (second game of two test series)

2008 – Won 42-6