South Africa’s rugby team has an overdeveloped sense of righteousness

One point, one card, two flankers.

The tale of a Rugby World Cup final in a nutshell. Sort of.

New Zealand’s captain, Sam Kane, shown yellow, then red for an upright, shoulder hit to the chin of Springbok centre Jessie Kriel. His opposite number Pieter-Steph Du Toit, meanwhile, turned in a 28-tackle man of the match performance on which All Black heroics foundered, broke and sank. 

It was a match notable really only for its tension rather than its quality. In his recent newsletter, Iain Martin has already commented on the increasing intrusiveness of rugby’s officiating. A criticism, not of the decisions, but of the increasing encroachment of tech-based overreach on the ebb, flow and empathy of sport and life. 

In grid iron terms, there was an almost  permanent ‘flag on the play’. A facet of a sport which takes hours to play 60 minutes and one rugby could well live without. New Zealand attempts to rally in the face of being a man down, leaving SA on the back foot for long periods, constantly hiccuped and burped as they tried to digest the interminable TMO interventions. 

They scored the match’s only try. At the second time of asking. The never-ending search for fault continued with the remorselessness of 1984 surveillance. 

As for the Springboks. Home again by a point. France. England. New Zealand. They did it the hard way and their will to win is surely a wonder. They have beaten the best to be the best. Well done to them. 

Afterwards, luminaries in the studio discussed how it is they keep doing it and how the northern hemisphere continues to come up short. Much concentration then on the South Africans ‘playing for something bigger’. Ever since 1995, their rugby has been imbued with purpose whether it was reconciliation under François Pienaar or transformation under Siya Kolisi, a black man who rose from the townships to conquer the world in what, by tradition, was the white man’s sport. 

There’s much to it. And much of it is commendable. 

However, deep in the South African psyche lies a notion not just of siege but, perhaps, a Voortrekker feeling that to laager is to protect and that adversity is the path to providence. It’s almost religious and, in SA, rugby long ago told God to get out of its chair. 

The danger of that, of course, is an overdeveloped sense of righteousness. For a ref even to penalise a Bok is not far off blasphemy and high priest Rassie Erasmus will be the first calling for an official to be put to the pyre and summoning the over-motivated of social media to put a torch to the brushwood. 

He has been banned for it before but one always gains the impression that, back home, it only encourages a contra mundum mentality that brooks no dissent and a fundamentalism that can absorb no criticism  Coaches complaining about officials in a game increasingly over-devoted to technicalities is very far from unusual but SA take it to unplumbed depths. 

For England’s Tom Curry to have entered the super-sensitive arena of race is tantamount to pissing on a saint’s statue. All the terrors of the Inquisition were summoned. 

What a shame for such a wonderful rugby nation. The deep, dark flip side of playing ‘for something bigger’ is to overlook that, at the end of it all, it is, as legendary French captain Jean-Pierre Rives once put it, “Fifteen friends gathered round a ball.”

If England, France and the other near-missers of the north were to take a lesson, then it is perhaps not to imbue their rugby with near spiritual significance. 

They might look more to education. 

South Africa’s elite education system is an object lesson in how to produce a production  line of top quality players in two Anglo sports. Rugby and cricket. 

English cricket has long been benefited from that diaspora from Robin Smith to Kevin Pietersen to Dawid Malan too name but a very, very few.

Many of the schools involved are SA’s oldest, often Afrikaans, religious in outlook and single sex. In that regard they mimic the muscular Christianity of the English Victorian public schools on which they were modelled. 

They are, of course, what we in Britain increasingly fear. Conservative, traditional, elite. Not that they exclude. A young Siya Kolisi  – then barely able to speak English – benefitted from a sporting scholarship to Grey’s. Almer mater to 46 Springboks.

The sporting rivalries these schools engender put Premiership rugby to shame. The annual game between Paarl Gim and Paarl Boys High School floods the town, attracts a crowd of up to 25,000 and a significant TV audience.

At the last World Schools Final, it was Grey’s of SA v Hamilton College of New Zealand. A victory – that time – for New Zealand. Luminaries like Sedbergh and Millfield from England fell by the wayside. As, it must be said, did Welsh and Irish counterparts.

Sport is still seen as a crucial developer, an outlet and discipline for youthful exuberance and a pursuit of excellence. The compare and contrast with a UK state system that often sees sport as a breeding ground for “toxic masculinity”, a distraction from the all-powerful curriculum and, gasp, an arena where outcomes may prove asymmetric or disappointing, is unfavourable.

Meanwhile the safetyist attitude that, under various motivations, good, bad and ugly, attends much of British life, is encouraging institutions to take what has been described as “the easy decision” and surrender rugby to a past that will see it viewed as something of a curiosity. Like cheese rolling or Florentine football. 

I increasingly fear this might be rugby’s fate. It is burying itself beneath laws of increasing technicality, often as an antidote to its essential nature and equally often counterproductively. 

South Africa seems unencumbered by the muddled social philosophies of our times and, if anything, has mobilised an old fashioned approach as a salve at least to the country’s many modern problems. In that positive sense, the Springboks are, indeed, playing for something bigger. 

The results are obvious. An unparalleled four world cups. The ability to eke them out by one point victories if required. A toughness bred young. An excellence instilled early. Elite because that’s what elite sport demands. 

England, meanwhile, still rise only to fall. Happy, if that’s the word, to be there or thereabouts. One football world cup. One rugby world cup. One cricket world cup. The dreams invested in the final two recently ended by South Africa. 

There is an insidious notion made true by repetition that “we’re rubbish at sport”. We’re not, you know. Very far from it. As our Olympians so often prove. But we should and could be so much better. 

Time to go back to school. 

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