After every World Cup comes a question — when do you move on and stop writing about it and focus on something else? I thought the English rugby media provided some kind of answer in 2019, when just a few days after their team lost the final to the Springboks they switched their focus completely to club rugby and Saracens’ salary cap problems.
But maybe a view that it all comes down to how the team you are covering performs at the finish is too simplistic. It also depends on how many talking points there are. There weren’t many after Yokohama as England were soundly beaten by 20 points. How could the people who backed England for a big win explain that defeat?
When England bowed out of the latest World Cup it was in a close semifinal in which there were enough talking points about the referees to provide further oxygen to the nasty atmosphere started by the French in their quest to find excuses for their quarterfinal exit.
And that nasty atmosphere has driven a bitter perspective from some sections of the overseas media and rugby public — ironically not so much New Zealand, probably because there is ongoing mutual respect between the two most successful rugby nations — that has left a skewed narrative about the Boks’ historic fourth World Cup title.
The ongoing antipathy to the Boks flared up again in the England media at the start of the weekend after Bongi Mbonambi was presented with his “wen kant” T-shirt by the Cape Town mayor during the trophy parade in the Mother City.
It wasn’t the Boks themselves that produced that shirt, it was presented in humour, and yet the way it was portrayed in the English media was that it was an example of the Boks being bullies and arrogant winners.
Not that it was the media reaction to the Mbonambi controversy that bothered me, but rather the way the Rugby Football Union (England) reacted when World Rugby decided there was insufficient evidence to pursue any case against Mbonambi. They appeared to assume guilt, and yet thinking that Mbonambi had a case of racism to answer to even if he did say the words Tom Curry attributed to him was disingenuous.
Slave traders
The “what if” brigade were out in force in England in the comments sections and social media after the Mbonambi incident made headlines. As in “What if it was reversed and it was a white player saying that to a black player, how would everyone react then?”
Well there would be a different reaction because it is actually different. Very different. The history of racism is not the discrimination of black against white, it is not the subjugation of white to black, and the slave traders of a few centuries ago were not black people who enslaved white people.
Most South Africans know this, which is why we struggled to take Curry seriously. Surely the RFU knows this too. Which is why they were being disingenuous. What the RFU were trying to get out of it by helping generate the media hype about it in the week of a World Cup final only they know, but it is hard to ignore the probability they just had malicious intent to pay back the team that beat them.
If that was the case the Boks had the last laugh as Mbonambi went off early and they proved they were effectively able to win without him. Mbonambi's injury did make it much harder though, which cues the other skewed narrative — the one that portrays the Boks as a boring team that plays a style some have called “antirugby”.
It is true they played a no-risk game in the final. But you have to play the conditions and the Boks discovered a week earlier in the semifinal that the kind of 80m tries they scored in the first half against France in the quarterfinal and at Twickenham last November weren’t likely on a wet Paris evening. They picked a side for the conditions; it was horses for courses.
They were given a fright in the semifinal by an England team that is inferior to them but which, because of their easy draw, was building up for that game several weeks ahead. The Boks couldn’t look that far ahead because of the significant jeopardy they faced before that.
The semifinal was England’s final, it was an all or-nothing day. The Boks played their final and hit their peak in the quarterfinal. Which is why winning the next two games was so commendable. Beating the hosts in a stadium filled with their fanatical supporters was a huge achievement and there was nothing antirugby about that Bok performance or the three tries that kept them in the game in the first half.
There was a time when the Boks may have had only one way to play but that has long passed. They are now quite capable of adjusting to what is needed. And in a World Cup, as the days of celebration in this country have indicated, what is needed most is the win.
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