RWC ’95: Don’t forget those brush ladies
legend. Cornwell is the exception and the result is a work that captures the famous battle and the personalities that were involved in a way that is literally unputdownable.
It is as though you were there at the time and you can almost smell the gunsmoke and hear the scream of the dying, horses and men, from the pages. The full title is Waterloo. The history of four days, three armies and three battles.
On completing this modern classic, the Rugby World Cup immediately came to mind. It is also a short time in which armies compete in a number of battles. History will record the scores and results but there is so much more to it than that.
In the same way that Napoleon would have won had not a Swissborn Dutch general called Baron Jean-Victor Constant-Rebecque decided to disobey an order before the battle, single decisions in a Rugby World Cup can make the difference.
This week we celebrated 20 years since the 1995 RWC victory and that has led to all sorts of memories coming back and also the realisation that, despite the glorious victory, so much could have gone wrong.
The obvious one was the semifinal in Durban.
How far away were the organisers from calling the game off due to the weather?
Remember that France had a superior disciplinary record at the time, so had the rain won, we were out.
I hope those ladies with the brushes were given a good bonus for their efforts. I wonder, did anyone ever get their stories about their endeavours that day. Did they realise what a massive contribution to the win they made? Don’t they deserve a vote of thanks today? Does anyone even know who they are?
The Abdelatif Benazzi try? Did that ball really not touch a blade of whitewashed grass when the giant lock plunged for the line?
Today, Welsh referee Derek Bevan would have asked, “try or no try?” and it would have been given. Benazzi swears he scored but says that the result meant so much for the new democracy and for Nelson Mandela that he was able to take the disappointment. What a man! Then there was Kitch Christie – a dour, single-minded Scot if ever there was one, but his preparation was superb.
He won with supreme fitness, defence and goal-kicking but people forget that he had a moment of madness before the final. For some reason he decided that the Boks would play a high-paced expansive game on the day. They would try and out-run the All Blacks and take them by surprise.
It would have been a total disaster and we would have been hockeyed. Jonah Lomu would have caused havoc as the spaces opened later in the game.
In the heel of the hunt, the senior players persuaded Kitch to change his mind and the game was an arm wrestle in which no spaces opened. This allowed for a heroic South African defence and the Joost and Japie tackles are as well remembered as anything else.
A good leader is able to change