Hope on the High Veldt ... if you forget the drubbings
BRENDAN GALLAGHER looks back at the big England wins on tour against the Springboks
England have taken some drubbings up on the High Veldt, they most certainly have, but their previous successes there also offer a little hope for Eddie Jones’ increasingly beleaguered squad who are beginning to feel the heat after a run of indifferent performances and results.
John Pullin’s side showed the way at Ellis Park in 1972, a phenomenal win that is celebrated and examined elsewhere on these pages, but there is also a record 32-17 win at Loftus Versveld in 1994 to consider. And then there is that 27-22 victory by Clive Woodward’s team in Bloemfontein in 2000, the victory that effectively relaunched England as a major force on the Test scene and led ultimately to a World Cup triumph in 2003.
All were achieved off the back of a dominant pack performance and although you suspect the Boks’ pack isn’t quite what it once was, that is still where South Africa have to be mastered if success is to be achieved.
The England forwards in 1994 were a fairly formidable crew not least the huge back row – Dean Richards at No.8, Ben Clarke at openside and Tim Rodber on the blindside – which wielded the rod to good effect. Rodber, in particular, turned in one of those world class performances that punctuated his career.
Just when you thought he had gone quiet and wasn’t punching his weight, Rodber would produce something right off the Richter scale. His individual performances for the Lions in the first two Tests of the 1997 tour are also cases in point.
Rodber was inspired in Pretoria that day in 1994 and, with the rest of the pack taking their cue from him, England strolled to victory. Rob Andrew and Clarke scored the tries and Andrew kicked 19 points while South Africa’s only reply was five penalties from Andre Joubert.
All looked set for a series win in Cape Town the following Saturday but England became badly distracted from the Tuesday onwards when they played Eastern Province in a filthy match in Port Elizabeth. A number of England players were left nursing ugly rakes and cuts on their torso, while Rodber and Simon Tremain were sent off for fighting which frankly, on the day, was a minor offence compared with those foul deeds that went unpunished.
For the rest of the week coach Jack Rowell and his team were contending with the fall-out from the Eastern Province game and the momentum from Pretoria vanished into thin air.
Rodber was eventually cleared to play but couldn’t recapture the magic and the England pack, so dominant a week earlier, blew up in the second half so much so that after being level 3-3 at the break England eventually lost 27-9.
It was a salutary lesson and not for the first time the underrated difficulty of coming down from altitude to play a game at sea level was thrown into the spotlight. It can be just as problematical as going the other way which gets all the publicity. The following year I watched Ireland, at the World Cup, come down too late from nearly a month of training and playing Pool games at altitude and run around like a bunch of zombies during their World Cup quarter-final against France. In 2000, under Woodward, England spent the entire five- match tour at altitude which wasn’t great for those hankering for the balmy Indian Ocean or the Atlantic breakers of the Cape peninsular but concentrated the minds wonderfully when it came to the rugby. After a warm up win against North West Leopards, England, with Austin Healey a late deputy for the ailing Jonny Wilkinson, went down 18-13 in extraordinary circumstances with Stimpson being denied one of the most obvious of penalty tries. Stimpson, below, was in the process of reaching high to try and gather the ball when Andre Vos, making no attempt to play the ball, tackled him early around the ankles. Referee Colin Hawke and the fourth official managed to surprise even South Africa as they started to gather under the posts by ruling a knock on by Stimpson as he was taken out off the ball. Woodward still fumes about it. But perhaps the anger at that decision was the making of that group. After a midweek win over the Griquas England roared back into action with a memorable 27-22 win at Bloemfontein with a much recovered Jonny Wilkinson scoring all 27 points with eight penalties and a dropgoal. That hard earned victory – the Boks rallied at the end when a hotly disputed try by Joost van der Westhuizen fired them up – was the start of England’s unprecedented run of 14 straight wins against Southern Hemisphere opposition. The only other time England have avoided defeat in South Africa was the final Test of the 2012 tour under Stuart Lancaster which offered a tantalising taster for the future. A brave England side, captained by Chris Robshaw, had contested the first two Tests reasonably well without ever looking like winning, but with Robshaw injured, after breaking a thumb, Dylan Hartley was asked to captain the side in the third Test, at Port Elizabeth.
With many critics predicting an end of tour shellacking, Hartley managed to inspire a very feisty display from England with a Danny Care try and three penalties from Owen Farrell earning a 14-14 draw.
Eddie Jones often gets the credit for his apparent left field selection of Hartley as captain, but Lancaster had already recognised his potential in that department. Alas for Lancaster, Hartley’s on-going disciplinary problems with Northampton made it very difficult for him to seriously look at him as a long term captaincy candidate with England.
So these are the England triumphs, but more often than not they have left South Africa with their tails between their legs. The most humiliating tour was in 2007 under Brian Ashton when England conceded 113 points in the two Tests. Add in the 36 England let in a few months later in the Pool stages
of RWC2007 and that was 149 points conceded in three games against the Boks. Even more remarkable therefore that England gave them a decent run for their money in the World Cup final a couple of weeks later before losing 15-6.
The first Test on that 2007 tour – Mike Brown’s debut incidentally – was at Bloemfontein and resulted in a fearful 58-10 hammering. England actually put a half decent back line out but many of their front-line forwards were either injured or had been given the summer off, and against one of the best ever Boks packs, flexing their muscles ahead of the World Cup, it was carnage with the pack creating the platform for a seven-try annihilation.
It was pretty much the same story a week later in Pretoria with England going down 55-22, the Boks on this occasion outscoring England eight tries to one.
It was a nightmarish trip and the bounce back a few months later in the World Cup in France still ranks as one of rugby’s enduring mysteries.
Humiliation was never far away in 1984 either, a tour that is often held up as an example of how England drifted through the mid-80s squandering their munificent talent and the legacy of that fine 1980 Grand Slam winning side which seemed for a short while to point England in the right direction.
England travelled with ten uncapped players in their 26-man party – a ridiculously small squad by today’s standards – and actually performed quite well in a series of five warm-up games against weakfish opposition, the likes of a Currie Cup B selection, a SA Federation XV and a SA Association XV.
It was no sort of preparation for taking on a revved-up Springboks and England were duly dispatched 33-15 in Port Elizabeth, the boot of Dusty Hare proving their only source of points.
It was predictably even more painful a week later at Ellis Park when a supercharged Danie Gerber helped himself to a hat-trick as South Arica ran in six tries in a 35-9 romp. Hare was again England’s only scorer.
Gerber was some player, mind, generally regarded as the world’s best centre during this era although with many teams reluctant to play South Africa on account of apartheid too little was seen of a sensational player who combined traditional Bok strength and power in midfield with serious wheels and guile.