“It’s a conspiracy, I’m not buying any of it”
Some accusations are made with a laugh. This one, Sir John Kirwan has repeated three times.
The former All Blacks winger appeared on the Rivals podcast on Thursday morning. The topic: New Zealand’s three warm-up games in South Africa, wins over the Stormers, the Sharks and the Bulls. Three wins. And in his view, they meant nothing.
“I think it’s a bit of a conspiracy theory. Rassie told those provincial teams not to play anything like the Springboks, we didn’t even see any box kicks,” he says. “We didn’t see kicks to the corners, no mauls. Nothing looked like what we’d expect.”
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Kirwan fumes over the Bulls
Kirwan didn’t stop there. He pictured the scene in Pretoria, and it wound him up all over again.
“The Bulls coach comes in and says: hi Victor, I’m South African and guess what, I’m going to try to play the All Blacks at their own game. You wouldn’t sack him on the spot? What is he doing there? Has he been taking something? There wasn’t even one clearance kick, was there?”
Another complaint. Rassie Erasmus kept most of his internationals at training camp and only released a handful of players back to their franchises. Kirwan gets the logic and says it himself: if he were in Erasmus’s shoes, he’d have done the same. That doesn’t stop him calling it “sad for the relationship and for the tour”, and frustrating for a South African crowd, which he says still isn’t turning up in the numbers you’d want.
Matfield disagrees
Across the table, Victor Matfield. The most-capped Springbok ever. He watched the Bulls match with his own eyes and tells a very different story.
“It was a spectacle, people loved it. I was there, the opening, the new Loftus, the lights, it was amazing. People were going wild in the second half when the Bulls came back.”
Matfield then lands on an argument Kirwan hadn’t seen coming: ticket prices. There are plenty of Tests this year, including two on the Highveld, at Ellis Park and in Soweto. South African fans are picking and choosing. He also backs Erasmus on how he managed his squad and points out that sending Johan Grobbelaar and Elrigh Louw back to the Bulls had an impact in the second half. His only regret? Provincial squads just aren’t as deep as they were 15 or 20 years ago, with so many players heading to Europe.
The first Test is at Ellis Park on Saturday. We’ll soon know who got it right.
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