I’ve watched the Rugby World Cup final like six times. It’s brilliant on TV but my favourite coverage is out of the British newspapers, which are particularly good when England lose something.
“England were up against a team whose culture is to stop and destroy,” noted former British & Irish Lions flyhalf Stuart Barnes in The Times, wondering how it was he’d forgotten writing before the 2015 final that “defences win World Cups” but that there were exceptions.
One was the 34-17 smashing of Australia by the All Blacks back then. And he’d been temporarily blinded by England’s semifinal win against New Zealand now. But, in hindsight, how could Eddie Jones have been so dumb? He picked the wrong scrumhalf, while Rassie just kept tossing the ball to Faf de Klerk, “one of rugby’s great nuisances”.
“As it was,” Barnes ended, “Cheslin Kolbe left Owen Farrell in an untidy heap as England’s defence despaired. SA had their set piece, the better halfback, a goal-kicker, and they had their defence. It all seems so clear.”
Like many ordinary Bok supporters I had to be reminded that of the three World Cup finals in which we’ve played, this was the first in which we have scored a try — two at that. And they were both scored by black Springboks.
I’ve been a Kolbe fan ever since I saw him twist and swerve his way through an entire team in a Western Province Currie Cup game a few years ago. But I knew hardly anything about Makazole Mapimpi, whose strength, power and speed are going to win games for us for years.
He grew up in Mdantsane, SA’s second-largest township after Soweto, just outside East London. He had an unusually hard life even by apartheid standards and first started playing for the Border Bulldogs in 2014 after they went bankrupt, because he was a cheap hire.
Mapimpi had already lifted another not insignificant cup as an amateur in the Dali Mpofu Easter Rugby Tournament, a rural competition played near King William’s Town. Mpofu, who is now an EFF leader and whose home village is in the area, has sponsored the tournament for years.
Border rugby used to be a force and some of the best rugby schools in the country then – Dale College, Selborne, Hoërskool Grens, Queens and even my own Umtata High — used to feed it. Umtata High even supplied a Springbok captain, Basil Kenyon, for a Test against the All Blacks in 1949.
I can think of at least 50 sites in Transkei for a full-on boarding school
The Eastern Cape is full of these tournaments every Easter. It is easily the best work Mpofu does because the Border region, and what I still call Transkei, are stuffed with rugby potential.
We just can’t see it because it’s poor and black and rural. These tournaments are an opportunity for someone just like Mapimpi to put a hand up.
The great Wallabies captain John Eales was asked after retiring what team he would most like to coach and he said it would be the Springboks because there is just so much talent here.
Hopefully, Mapimpi’s efforts will get SA Rugby to scout deeper than a few famed schools. Over the hill there, a mile down from that tree, there’s a kid who is smart and who can play. How to find him?
As it happens I have the perfect answer. Boarding schools. All over rural SA kids trudge a long way to poor schools and then go home again, often in the dark, having learnt precious little. Their teachers drive modest cars over treacherous roads and arrive late and leave early. There’s no sport, no library. No nothing.
I can think of at least 50 sites in Transkei for a full-on boarding school where the pupils and teachers stay on the premises, where there’s electricity, a handyman who can fix the lawnmower and staff to keep playing fields trim. Where kids can get three meals a day and a decent education at the same time.
Where they can do homework with a teacher to help, and if the one in the class can’t help then there’s another in the staff quarters. Where there are coaches for rugby and soccer and netball and cricket and whatever boys and girls want to play. Where there’s a clinic that gets a doctor to visit.
One rule — the parents have to pay something. Not a fortune, but a stretch nonetheless. Rural boarding schools have given this country leadership in the past and there’s no reason they could not do so again. Building them would create invigorating economic activity.
Decent schools, after all, are the best infrastructure any economy could ask for and they could create new stars and new leaders the likes of whom we can only dream about now, as ours succumb to self-interest, sloth, criminality and, worst of all, narcissism. May Makazole Mapimpi keep it real.
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