The day an All Black took a stand
As Nelson prepares to host the All Blacks tonight, a former coach recalls another momentous day for the region. Richard Knowler reports.
As he leaned on a spade in his garden, Merv Jaffray listened to his wife issue regular updates on how Nelson Bays were faring against the Springboks at Trafalgar Park in 1981.
In your mind’s eye you can picture Jaffray thrusting his gardening tool deeper into the soil as the latest scoreline is delivered.
The truth be told, Nelson Bays were getting a hiding. The final result wasn’t pretty: 83-0 to the Springboks, and this was when tries were still worth four points.
Jaffray, a former Otago and All Blacks flanker who made four appearances on the tour of Argentina in 1976, should have been at Trafalgar Park that day rather than eventually downing the garden tools to take a drive out to Tahunanui Beach with his kids and dog.
Because Jaffray was the Nelson Bays coach, after all.
Instead he made the decision to boycott the fixture, having opposed the tour by South Africa on moral grounds.
‘‘It was just the situation, what was going on over there and all the rest of it,’’ Jaffray, 69, said this week. ‘‘They talk about sport and politics and all the rest of it, but I just thought we did the wrong thing by allowing them to come over here at that time.’’
A retired banker who now lives in Auckland, Jaffray never regretted leaving the team as they warmed up for one of the biggest games in Nelson Bays’ history.
Instead he retired to his back yard to prepare his vegetable patch for the spring plantings. ‘‘I was digging my garden over and my wife was occasionally telling me the score, as it went higher and higher,’’ Jaffray recollected.
‘‘It felt a bit flat, really. You have the expectation you are not going to do that well, but you like to think you could keep the score a little bit closer than what it ended up.’’
The players, he said, respected his decision to avoid the fixture. Earlier that season Jaffray had declared his hand, saying he didn’t want any involvement with the touring South Africans. ‘‘We had a light lunch on the day of the game, and we went to the ground and I did the team talk and everything like that. I then went home about an hour before the game.’’
Jaffray, who has never seen any footage of the encounter, didn’t join the players for the post-match function.
‘‘I felt a bit sorry for the guys, but that was just the way it was. A number of that South African team played the All Blacks the following week and beat them. Our guys just got run over.’’
There was more heartache for Nelson Bays in 2000, when the province drew 25-25 with Scotland at Trafalgar Park.
Nelson Bays fullback Mark Milne had the chance to kick the winner, as he lined up the handy conversion of Joe Faaiu’s try near the posts in the final moments. But Milne hooked it and the ball sailed past the uprights.
‘‘I felt gutted, gutted for the guys, gutted for our team,’’ Milne, who scored two tries, later told the Nelson Mail.
With the benefit of hindsight Milne said he probably should have taken the ball back a bit further away from the posts.
The Nelson Bays provincial union was founded in 1969 when Nelson merged with Golden BayMotueka.
In 2006, Nelson Bays merged with Marlborough to become the Tasman Rugby Union.
The Mako, now a powerhouse provincial team, will contribute Shannon Frizell and Tim Perry to the All Blacks’ match-day 23 to play Argentina at Trafalgar Park tonight. Nelson has already proved capable of hosting international matches, successfully staging three World Cup pool games in 2011.
There has also been on the odd Super Rugby fixture played at Trafalgar Park, and when Lancaster Park was damaged by the earthquakes four games were played in the city that season.
When the temporary stadium was built in Addington, Christchurch, part of the deal was that the Crusaders keep all their home games at the venue. The most recent outing in Nelson was against the Hurricanes in 2015, won 35-18 by the Crusaders.
However, with NZ Rugby declaring it won’t stage tests in Christchurch in 2018 and 2019, citing concerns about the facilities at the temporary stadium at Addington and infrastructure, Nelson has seized its chance.
It’s getting set to host another battle at Trafalgar.
‘‘They talk about sport and politics and all the rest of it, but I just thought we did the wrong thing by allowing them to come over here at that time.’’
Merv Jaffray, left