The Sharks stunned the Bulls a week ago — and all the talk was that they managed to win without the big three among world rugby’s prize fighters: Ox Nche, Eben Etzebeth and Siya Kolisi.
Another talking point should have been the transformative make-up of the run-on XV because it said so much about the ever-changing face of the sport, which now comfortably speaks to a nation and not a minority.
Transformation is not to be confused with quotas.
“Quotas” was, and remains, the ugliest of labels. Fortunately, it is seldom used by coaches or players of this era — though it unfortunately gets its fair share of being uttered on social media. Those dissenting voices, whoever they are, are in the minority because the majority now celebrate the qualities of a player.
Those terrible times when players were categorised “quota”, based on not being white, are gone and South African rugby is winning on most fronts.
Rassie Erasmus, when head of performance at SA Rugby in 2013, basically banned the word quota in talent identification. He rightly felt the word branded players of colour as being inferior to their white counterparts, doing a disservice to transformation. The way it had been applied by coaches had also created the perception that white players were being sacrificed in team selections because of a policy called quota selections.
Transformed
Erasmus has always been about black player opportunities, as evidenced in the teams he has coached in South Africa, and his Springboks are the most transformed in the history of the country post-apartheid and international rugby isolation, which ended in 1992.
King Kolisi is the captain — and ranks among the most celebrated players on the international circuit. The most recent cover of SA Rugby Magazine is of Kolisi, describing the double World Cup winner as “Simply the Best”.
Lukanyo Am combined with Makazole Mapimpi to score the Springboks’ very first World Cup final try against England in Japan in 2019, and winger Cheslin Kolbe added the second. The Boks have played in four World Cup finals and won them all, but those two remain the only tries the Springboks have scored in all four finals.
Mapimpi’s try will never be erased in memory because of its significance. Neither will the first time Kolisi, in 2018, led a transformed Springboks team out at Emirates Airline Park in Johannesburg to a thrilling 42-39 win against Eddie Jones’s England.
Erasmus picked 10 players of colour in his match 23, unprecedented in Springboks Test match history in terms of black representation, and last season, in his second stint as Springboks coach, there were regularly nine and 10 players of colour starting Tests.
Famous win
The Sharks started against the Bulls with 12 players of colour, six in the backs and six in the forwards, and each player contributed to a famous win, given the unavailability of seven current Test Springboks and Scottish international Dylan Richardson.
It was a remarkable win, but the statement of transformation was even bigger than the result.
The Sharks, from when Eduard Coetzee was made CEO, and the Cape-based Stormers, in the John Dobson coaching era of the past five years, have been the leaders in black player game time opportunities. The two coastal franchise giants are the drivers of change, alongside Erasmus’s Boks.
Jacques Nienaber, the Bok coach between 2020 and 2023, was Erasmus’s assistant from 2018 and his four-year tenure was as powerful a statement of black player selection.
The Bulls are the one franchise that has stagnated in black player numbers, and one seldom sees more than six in a match 23 or four in a starting XV. The irony of this is that Patrice Motsepe is one of the owners.
The Bulls and Lions know they have work to do while the inspiration comes from the Sharks, Stormers and Boks.
Transformation can never be celebrated enough in South African rugby because 25 years ago there were just three players of colour in South Africa’s 120-strong four Super Rugby franchises — and they were all wingers.
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