Rugby’s great rivalries, it seems, are no longer exclusively contested inside the touch and dead ball lines.
Increasingly the ferocious combat on the field is being mirrored by behaviour, though far removed from the playing surface, that at times carries even greater venom and spite.
The battle field is often fought on social media platforms, where relative anonymity emboldens fidgety fingers and hateful hearts.
To be fair, outrageous and churlish comments aren’t just the domain of members of the public. Increasingly, media representatives are happy to play in that space, with certain members of the fourth estate becoming fifth columnists.
Some treat the build up and fall out from Test matches with such patriotic fervour you’d swear their country is under actual attack.
Some of course are more acerbic than others but then you get instances where the writer deliberately uses language to drive up clicks, they are naive or they are racist.
This week a New Zealand journalist on a reputable news outlet ventured headlong into these murky waters with his description of some Springbok forwards.
“The scrum did feel the heat from the Boks’ ‘bomb squad’ who replaced the three transformation front-rowers,” he wrote in reference to Ox Nche, Bongi Mbonambi and Trevor Nyakane.
The scrum did feel the heat from the Boks’ ‘bomb squad’ who replaced the three transformation front-rowers.
— New Zealand journalist’s reference to Ox Nche, Bongi Mbonambi and Trevor Nyakane.
The pejorative backlash, as you’d expect, was swift. There may be subtle differences as to what constitutes racism in SA and New Zealand but the writer’s preferred description of the three black players was aimed at devaluing them.
The word “transformation” at some point in the dead of night replaced “quota” as reference to a black player who is selected on the basis of the colour of his skin.
To suggest Nche, Mbonambi and Nyakane are not deserving of their place in the Bok squad is ridiculous. Mbonambi and Nyakane were active participants in a successful Rugby World Cup campaign, though the latter suffered an untimely injury.
Nche has emerged as a streetwise operator, equally adept at making an impact in the scrum as he does in the tight loose. He has excelled at every level he has played at.
All three featured prominently in defeating the British and Irish Lions in a Test series, something New Zealand failed to do the last time the red clad team went that far south.
Frankly speaking, the six props, including the above mentioned three, who the Boks routinely send into battle in their match day squad are more likely to leave a bigger imprint on the game than any six-prop configuration the Kiwis opt for.
The Kiwi journalist’s choice of words and resultant fallout have served to remind how unnecessarily wide battle lines are now drawn.
The irony is the players, the actual combatants the Springboks and the All Blacks send into battle, get along like a house on fire and some are buddies.
They espouse some of the game’s core values, built around respect, discipline, team work and, perhaps above all, camaraderie.
“I’m nothing without New Zealand and New Zealand is nothing without SA,” said Springbok captain Siya Kolisi when I asked him last week about the battles fought away from the pitch. “People expect us to hate each other. We are human beings. Yes, I want to beat them and I encourage myself (to do that) each and every time. After the 80 minutes we can sit and be normal and talk.
“I can’t tell people how to think, but it is a game,” Kolisi said sagely.
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