The Greatest Currie Cup Final Ever
In 1990, a resurgent Natal entered fortress Loftus for the final having been twice badly beaten by a powerful Northern Transvaal side in the round-robin phase of the competition.
As a final it had everything: a death, a freak injury and an unusual – and not universally popular – refereeing decision by referee for the day, Freek Burger. That wasn’t all. The final also had an unexpected late second-half twist. And a twist it quite literally was.
Early on in the winter of 1976, Freek Burger’s knee was badly crocked by a Jan “Boland” Coetzee late tackle in a club rugby game between Police and Maties down in the Western Cape. The injury wasn’t crippling but it was bad enough to suggest that the fly-half needed to take stock.
Burger thought hard, but not too hard. After a good think he hobbled rather than walked away from the game he loved.
With his boots hung up what on earth was he going to do? Refereeing seemed to be the logical next step, although it was more like the logical next shuffle given the status of his knee. Burger had the idea that he might be more than capable with a whistle around his neck. He might like giving a blow a go.
Having joined the Western Province Referees’ Association, he started refereeing on Saturday mornings at schools in and around Cape Town. He refereed koshuis rugby at the University of Stellenbosch, something he enjoyed. He quickly developed a reputation for someone who had no difficulty in distinguishing between gamesmanship and foul play.
He realised he was progressing through the ranks when he was chosen to officiate in the 1977 Craven Week in Oudtshoorn. The competition that year was won by Eastern Province, who beat Western Province 19-17 in the final. Burger wasn’t awarded the final, he was too young and inexperienced for that, but he does remember two great players in that Eastern Province side: Danie Gerber and Tito Kankowski.
Of all the players he had the privilege to see at close quarters: Naas Botha, Carel du Plessis, Philippe Sella, Nick Farr-Jones, Jannie Breedt, Bill Beaumont, Serge Blanco and Gavin Hastings, Burger says that Gerber was the most casually and scandalously talented.
A couple of years later – he’s not exactly sure – and Burger had progressed to refereeing in the National Club Rugby Championships in Durban over the Easter Weekend. In one such Easter Champs was Gerber’s Dispatch.
“They had no numbers on their shirts and no names either,” remembers Burger. “But Danie was their man. He was one of the best players I’ve ever seen. He beat players with skill. We haven’t got that anymore. We’ve just lost it.”
Like an apprentice cabinet-maker in the cabinet-maker’s guild, as the late 1970s progressed Burger learned his trade. It was not without its early challenges. He warns that young and comparatively inexperienced referees have to be careful in schools’ matches and what he calls “mommies with umbrellas”.
They have to be careful of over-vociferous parents on the touchline in general. By definition, school sport is a place where everyone knows absolutely everything, their emotions coloured by their love of their children. It can make the job of a referee a tad tiresome. Club rugby brought its challenges too, although these often took the form of rowdy spectators spilling over the touchline.
Whether history had a way of finding him or whether he had a way of finding history it’s difficult to tell. But in 1979, at the Police Ground in what was then Salisbury, he refereed Rhodesia versus Northern Transvaal. It was Rhodesia’s last-ever Currie Cup game because it was clear by then that Rhodesia would become independent Zimbabwe. They didn’t want their international rehabilitation to be compromised by association with the apartheid regime, so the Rhodesians pulled out of the Currie Cup.
Rhodesia were a handy side, with Ian Robertson, David Smith and Ray Mordt playing against Naas Botha’s men. It was a ding-dong affair. The lead changed hands several times. Naas, Burger says, won the game for Northern Transvaal with a 70 metre drop kick not long before he blew the final whistle. Afterwards, with appropriate pomp and ceremony, the local band played Vera Lynn’s “Now is the Hour” with the famous opening lines, “Now is the hour when we must say goodbye.”
Like all apprentices, Burger needed a mentor. His was Max Baise, famous for his failure to award Fergus Slattery a try in the fourth Test at Ellis Park during the British Lions’ victorious series over the Springboks in 1974. Baise is in his early 90s nowadays. He lives in Riversdale on the edge of the Karoo. Burger doesn’t say exactly what Blaise’s presence did for him. But you sense it was important for Burger that that someone like Baise was simply there to field the occasional question or deal with an esoteric expression of the law.
Burger doesn’t attribute it particularly to Baise but says that one of the things he learned along the way is that a referee must always have an extra whistle in his kit-bag. He must always pack that kit-bag himself. And he must always see to it that the whistle works before he needs it. Whistles have been known to get clogged with soap. Or shampoo. Or conditioner. It is not a good idea to wet your whistle. There is so much general muck that collects in a kit bag. Having a whistle that doesn’t whistle is not a good way to impose yourself upon a game of rugby when the manne are on edge and waiting for you to blow it.
In 1989, after putting in the hard yards, Burger made his international debut, being chosen to referee in France’s two home Tests that November against Australia in Strasbourg and Lille. Burger loved Strasbourg. He calls it “a lovely spot”. His international debut was made all the more memorable because just beforehand Paul Dobson, who was head of the South African referees’ committee, arrived unexpectedly in Strasbourg from South Africa.
“Out of the blue and he was there with my Springbok blazer,” says Burger. “In those days there were no neutral colours, so we wore Springbok colours, South Africa wasn’t an official member of the International Rugby Board at the time. So my blazer was just like a Springbok blazer. It was a very special moment for me and I’ll be forever grateful to Paul.”
By that stage Burger had developed a pre-match ritual: In stadiums he knew, he liked to sit in the same place in the dressing-room. On the day before the match he always had what he calls his “own captain’s run” at the stadium or ground in which he was meant to officiate.
He would go to the ground, say, on the afternoon before the match, get into his tracksuit and make sure that he had his whistle. He would look at the light, feel the spring of the turf underfoot. He would referee an invisible Test, before thousands of invisible spectators, having a soundless conversation with two non-existent captains. Some people thought he was crazy but he begs to differ. He would only do his shadow captain’s run for about 40 minutes, he says, but it made him feel more in command of himself and his nerves for the following day.
The Wallabies won the first Test on a football pitch in Strasbourg. You can see at least portions of the match it on YouTube if you’re that way inclined. You can see the dim outline of a centre circle in the middle of the pitch. Whether serendipitously or by design, the ball Wallaby flyhalf Michael Lynagh kicks off with is called a Wallaby.
At about five minutes in to the highlights’ clip I watched I saw Burger for the first time, facing the camera, his two Scottish touch judges alongside. He is in white shorts and a green jersey with two golden hoops on the sleeve of each upper arm. He is flexing his shoulder muscles, not smiling but expectant. He looks as though he’s a little boy who has been saving his pocket money for a long time and is about to go off on his summer holidays.
As he and his two touch-judges turn to trot towards the centre-circle something splendid happens. One of the touch judges gently touches the small of Burger’s back. The gesture might be understood as a form of condescension. I don’t understand it that way at all. I see it as a gesture of support. It is saying: “Good luck on your big day Freek – we’re right behind you. We’re here to support you in any way we can.”
The Wallabies won the Test but went on to lose in Lille. After the Strasbourg Test Burger was presented with an autographed Wallaby jersey by Farr-Jones. He says one of his most memorable moments as a referee was receiving a knock on his door after a match and opening it to find Jannie Breedt standing there with two beers in his hand. Breedt was the perfect gentleman, says Burger. He fails to mention that he was seldom offered beers or autographed jerseys by the skippers of losing teams, although we shouldn’t be surprised that he doesn’t.
Six months after his two Tests in France, Burger refereed in the 1990 Currie Cup final, between Northern Transvaal and Natal at Loftus Versfeld. In those days the final of the competition was played by the first and second-placed teams on the log after two rounds of home and away matches, with the top team on the log having home ground advantage.
In round eight of the competition, Natal hosted Northern Transvaal in Durban, the Northern Transvaalers coming away victorious by 24 to nine. In Round 16 of the competition Northern Transvaal won 28-6. It didn’t need a much perspicacity to realise that come final day Natal were on a hiding to nothing.
Natal’s road to the final had been nine grim years in the making. In 1981 they were relegated to the Currie Cup’s B Section, losing a promotion-relegation game against Eastern Transvaal in Springs. To this day it still rankles Wynand Claassen the Natal skipper.
“First they should have played the game in Durban,” he says. “And then they didn’t wait. I was in New Zealand with the Boks and so was Gawie Visagie, he’d been flown out as a replacement. Dick Cox had to come out of retirement for that one in Springs. And we lost, so we went down.”
Natal’s new-found B-Section status didn’t mean the death of rugby in the province. They always pulled healthy home crowds. And they always did well against touring teams from outside the country. In 1984 the won the B Section – a regular occurrence – and but lost their playoff game for promotion.
As winners of the B Section, however, they played in the 1984 Currie Cup semi-final, where they beat Orange Free State. The final was against Western Province at Newlands. Natal found themselves up 9-3 at half-time. Claassen thinks the margin should have been bigger. “Rob Hankinson dotted down in the in-goal area in the first half and that would have made it 15-3 but Cassie Carstens, the ref, disallowed it. They had virtually the entire Springbok pack and they were too much for us in the second-half and we went down 19-9 in the end.”
The crusty men in their tweed jackets noted Natal’s Currie Cup run in ’84. They noted, too, Natal’s apparent inability to pull themselves out of the B Section, more often than not finding themselves in Welkom for the annual promotion-relegation match against the Purple People-Eaters of Northern Free State.
It was a match that Natal almost invariably lost thanks to the slick boot of Northern Free State’s fly-half Eric Herbert. How Natal would have loved it if Herbert wore black-and-white instead of purple.
In 1986 the crusty men made a big decision, and by presidential decree, promoted Natal into the A Section of the Currie Cup. Doc Craven always had a soft spot for the Banana Boys, so in 1987 they took their place alongside Western Province, Transvaal and the groot kanone of the provincial game for the first time since 1981.
Their promotion was not an immediate success, although there was halting upward progress. In 1987 they finished sixth out of seven; in 1988 they finished fifth out of seven, above Eastern Province in sixth and Orange Free State in seventh; in 1989 Natal finished the Currie Cup A Section in fifth, above South West Africa (sixth), Northern Free State (seventh) and Eastern Province (eighth), winning seven of their 14 games, the same number as Transvaal. They were gaining ground metre by painful metre but it was rather like fighting for the hill they had yet to see the top of.
The late Ian McIntosh was part of the progress. According to Claassen he’d arrived at Natal from newly-independent Zimbabwe in 1982, playing a kind of director of coaching role at the union, although that wouldn’t have been his official title.
Mac was no stranger to hard graft. He was a regular visitor to the local schools. He used to go to out-of-the-way places like Kokstad and Vryheid to speak to club players and coaches up there. Claassen says McIntosh’s end-of-year weekend symposiums at the Elangeni were always well-attended. “He was part of the environment,” says Claassen, “I remember him, for example, acting as chaperone for the wives when we went off to the Currie Cup final in Cape Town in ’84. By the time Koos Beukes retired, Ian had already been in the system for a good few years – he was already to take over.”
Although Natal had been mauled by Northern Transvaal in the round-robin fixtures of the 1990 Currie Cup, Claassen remembers Ian Mac hatching a plan ahead of the final. Claassen drove up to the final from Durban with his son, Antonie, then six years old, and checked in to the same Holiday Inns hotel Natal were staying in close to Loftus.
As luck would have it, he met André Botha in the lift. Botha hadn’t been a regular for Natal through the season but here he was. What was going on? Claassen had heard Botha would play at lock with “Vleis” Visagie in the final, with Visagie’s usual partner, Steve Atherton, moving to the flank. He put this to Botha. Botha simply smiled. It was all Claassen needed to know.
Shortly before the match Jan Lock, who had played in the curtain-raiser and was, in fact, erroneously named in the Northern Transvaal starting 15 for the final, had a fatal heart-attack in the Loftus showers. When I asked Burger if there was ever any discussion of postponing the match because of Lock’s death he told me that as far as he was aware the discussion never happened.
That wasn’t all. As the teams were running down the tunnel, Pieter Nel ruptured his Achilles tendon and was replaced by Hendrik Kruger. If this caused the home side a slight wobble, they didn’t let it show. They were at home. In front of the faithful, who were packed to the rafters in shirt-sleeves and T-shirts as they sat in front of hoardings advertising Nashua and PPC Cement and the Perm Building Society. The only black people in sight were the vendors.
Looking back on the highlights there doesn’t seem to be a Natal fan in sight although commentators Hugh Bladen and Gavin Cowley assure us they are there.
Except, that is, for Claassen and his six year old son, in their replica natal jerseys. As a former Blue Bull, Claassen is an honorary life-member at Loftus and is entitled to tickets to each and every home game. That sunny Saturday afternoon at Loftus he found himself badly outnumbered, surrounded by Northern Transvaal supporters. He had to be careful not to cheer too loudly. “There I was, supporting Natal with all my former Northern Transvaal teammates,” he says.
It was pinch-yourself stuff for Claassen and his son, because Natal went into a 9-3 lead at half-time, the young pivot, Joel Stransky, kicking three penalties, to one successful long-range effort by Gerbrand Grobler, the Northerns full-back.
Directly after the break, Grobler scored the final’s first try. Stransky’s kick-off to start the second-half was gathered by the Northerns forwards without too much difficulty and funnelled down the line, Kruger putting Grobler away in the far corner as he pumped the air with his free hand before dotting down beneath the posts.
Botha was successful with the straightforward conversion and after being six points off the pace going into the break, the hosts and favourites were now all-square at nine-all. The momentum had shifted. Ian Mac must have been a worried man, fearing a big Northerns second-half.
Northerns were clearly on a blue roll because the next points of the half were also theirs. Minutes later, Botha, the player referee Burger had watched successfully pot a 70-metre drop-goal against Rhodesia way back in 1979 when he was just learning his trade, was his usual composed self in giving Northerns the lead with another. At that stage Northerns were ahead 12-9, having scored nine unanswered points in the half.
It had yet to become ominous; then again, Natal couldn’t allow Northerns to score again because, if they did, the final would be slipping out of their grasp.
With the exception of time spent away from running because of his Coetzee-induced knee injury, Burger was always an exceptionally fit referee. He was a regular Comrades marathon athlete through the 1980s. Although it was hot that Saturday afternoon at the Loftus temple, Burger eased through the second-half. He was to play a big part in the latter stages of the match in a manner that could hardly have been forseen.
With the clock running down and Northerns retaining their three-point lead thanks to Botha’s drop-goal, came the defining moment of the match. Halfway through the half, halfway in the Northerns half, halfway in from touch on the eastern side of the field, Jamieson, the Natal skipper, fed the scrum. Out the ball came, with Natal going right; Stransky broke blind but was pulled down by a second and third wave of Northerns defenders.
The ball was quickly re-cycled on the Natal side, from Jamieson to Dick Muir, to Jeremy Thomson and, finally, Tony Watson on the wing, who shuttled down the touchline with the Northerns corner flag in sight. As Watson was approached by Theo van Rensburg, Northerns defender, it looked as if a promising move would fizzle out as the inevitable happened, Van Rensburg bundling Watson into touch.
Only it didn’t happen this way. Somehow, Houdini-like, Watson slipped out of Van Rensburg’s grasp as Van Rensburg was in the very act of nabbing him. Was it a sleight-of-hand, or a sleight-of-foot? Given the camera placement on the opposite of the ground it’s impossible to tell.
Watson scored the try and Stransky obliged with a straightforward conversion. At a crucial stage of the match Natal were three points ahead 15-12. Claassen and his son had to show great self-control not to look too excited. Everyone was getting twitchy.
An entire stadium seemed to accept at this point that matters would resume with Botha kicking off. Burger begged to differ. He had noticed that Jannie Claassen, the Northerns centre, had elbowed Watson in the back as Watson dotted down. Directly after the try was scored he awarded a penalty to Stransky on the half-way line. Natal were in no mood to argue. They accepted their windfall. The young Stransky, with a stellar calm that belied his years, ran up and hit it magnificently. Natal had a six-point cushion. It wasn’t long to go before Freek blew that famous Burger whistle.
When asked about the decision to award Natal that final penalty Burger is in no doubt that he made the correct choice. Claassen, sitting in the stands with his six year-old son, agrees.
The men who make these decisions must have agreed, too, because Burger was back at Loftus in 1991, when Northern Transvaal beat Transvaal 27-15. The year after that and Natal were again in the final and Burger was the referee when they beat Transvaal 14-13 at Ellis Park.
Clearly Burger was their lucky referee. Not bad for a side who came up to the A Section not because they could win promotion playoff but because they were beneficiaries of a presidential decree.