The roar that was heard around the world
They say you could hear the cheers from Pirates clear to the other side of Parkhurst last Saturday. A deafening, wordless, symphony of celebration that charged down Fourth Avenue, past the Jolly Roger, where it picked up volume, and through the streets of the suburb.
It said nothing and everything. It was relief and disbelief, pride and wonder, belief and realisation in an extended wave of noise that is still lapping on the shores of the hearts of this beautiful, befuddled nation.
It was a victory desperately wanted, but not entirely expected. It was, as Rassie Erasmus said, a moment of some hope.
I was asked all week what I thought would happen in the final. My answer had just three words. “I don’t know.”
I didn’t. The Springboks had a plan. Erasmus said he was not bluffing when he told a media conference exactly how the Springboks were going to play in the final.
Paul Rees of The Guardian wrote that it was his funniest moment of the tournament: “Rassie Erasmus’s incredulous look when asked if he was a bluffer having revealed SA’s team and tactics for the final two days early.”
Except that it was a small bluff. Erasmus always has a twist or a trick. He is an innovator and a pragmatist, blessed with an ability to pick apart the dangers of the opposition and amplify the strengths of his own team.
Would the Springboks play a different way? “I don’t know.”
They began arriving at 6.30am at Pirates on Saturday. By 7.30am all the good tables inside the main bar had been taken. Myself and my mate Barry Skjoldhammer had prepaid a barman for a case of beer to be placed on our prime table the TV nearest the door, close to the bar and with a good breeze coming through the day before, after the bronze medal match.
We had sat at the same table for most of the tournament. We weren’t going to change our ways. Unlike Erasmus. One man sat at his table by himself for over two hours before his friends joined him. A family arrived early and split up, saving three tables, with the wife angry at being made to guard a table by herself.
The crowds kept coming. The outside tables filled up.
Chairs and tables were pulled out of cars. People sat down the embankment. Eventually they had to close the gates.
Non Welsford, the manager of Pirates, reckoned there must have been about 5,000 there. It was glorious madness. They came with a healthy thirst and an anxious hope. They drank and they sang. And they roared. They bellowed with a blood lust when Tendai Mtawarira dismantled Dan Cole as he had done Phil Vickery during the Lions tour 10 years before.
As perfect as his timing was last Saturday, so was the Beast’s timing in announcing his international retirement this week. I interviewed him for the first time over a decade ago. He was shy, unused to the attention, and spoke with a voice that came from the soles of his feet.
Will the Springboks be the same without him? I don’t know. I hope so. They counted down the final seconds of the game at Pirates, but had to wait two precious seconds until Handré Pollard, playing with a broken cheekbone, kicked the ball out to end the match.
Then came the roar that was heard around the world. I watched the 1995 final at Pirates. Those were different days 24 years ago, when SA was young and foolish. Those were wonderfully naive days, when we could dream a little more and fret a little less.
Those were days when SA’s future was an open book. We bought into it, but we should have known that it was a moment and a chance that would be spurned.
Watching Siya Kolisi with the cup on Saturday, listening to his words and those of his coach, felt very different. Kolisi was real and honest; so too was Erasmus. This win will not drastically alter the course of SA. It will not fix the aching inequality and the lack of transformation. It will not give the Kolisis of Zwide another meal when they are hungry.
But it did give SA a moment of respite, reason to reflect and wonder. Will the win of 2019 bring any change, no matter how small?
I don’t know. But I hope so.