'He ain’t heavy, he’s my Divvy'

Surely no-one has ever been as shattered at the result of a sports event than colleague Brenden Nel was on Monday as we headed out of Wellington on the long road to Auckland.

In fact he was so apoplectic about the refereeing of Bryce Lawrence that about an hour after the game had ended on Sunday night he was already asking me if maybe we should hit the road there and then. When I asked him what his reasoning was he said “Because this is Dodge City”.

There was no logic in that comment. For the rest of our stay in Wellington he thought it was the most wonderful place in the world. So I managed to reason him down from that ridiculous stance. By the time the Springboks were getting onto their bus to take them to the airport I was walking home from a night of drowning my own sorrows.

The sun was up, there was no way I was going to head for Auckland at that hour, so we left much later and spent the night in Rotorua. The drive though made me wonder if I shouldn’t have followed my other calling, which was psychology. Somewhere around Porirua,the Hollies hit “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother” was played on the radio and Brenden, with a maudlin look on his face, started singing “He ain’t heavy, he’s my Divvy’.

For heaven’s sakes, Brenden, get a grip. Not that I was feeling much better than he was, it was just that the previous night I had told someone who asked an hysterical question during the post-match Q and A on Supersport.com that he should get over it as the sun would rise in the morning. It did, so that was a prediction I got right…

Talking of Divvy, his four years have been one hell of an emotional ride for me. In the beginning, in fact for a long time, it was a negative kind of emotion, but just lately I have come to admire his refusal to be nothing but himself so much that I struggled to fight back tears during his final World Cup press conference. Dinkum.

Whatever else you want to say about the coach, his handling of the media and public spotlight has improved immeasurably over the past 12 months. I still disagree with him on the John Smit selection for the quarterfinal but it didn’t have an impact on the result and Smit did what was expected of him while he was on the field. In fact it was probably Smitty’s best game of the year.

Some time ago, when I got rid of the anger, my own view became that anything that happened on Div’s four-year watch was the fault of the people who appointed him – he did not appoint himself. So it was good to hear that he and his team received a heroes' welcome when they returned home on Monday. As Robbie Deans said the other day, he is a good guy.

As I wrote in my Monday morning review, the questions we had about Div were also left unanswered by the circumstances of Sunday’s defeat. Was the team too old? They didn’t look old in the quarterfinal. Would they have been able to sustain momentum to a World Cup final and another title? We will never know, but they would probably have come damn close.

In the end Div ended up with a win percentage not unlike that of Jake White, and the only thing that may have separated the two coaches was the fact that Div’s team played Australia and White’s team only got to play England and Argentina. Oh, and White’s team never got Bryce Lawrence as a referee.

What confounds me about Mr Lawrence is the question of what he was doing at this World Cup in the first place. He was appalling when he refereed a Super Rugby qualifier between the Crusaders and Sharks in Nelson earlier this year and should have been sanctioned. Instead he got appointed to referee the final. Shame on you Sanzar!

He also admitted last week that he had made key errors which may have cost Australia their pool game against Ireland. So shame on you IRB for appointing him to then referee the quarterfinal. And shame on you again for bringing him to this tournament when there is another far more qualified Mr Lawrence back home in South African who should have been here instead. You know the one - the optician and part-time magician.

Many Kiwis have apologised to me for the refereeing of Lawrence in the past 24 hours. They would know what it feels like after that missed forward pass in the Cardiff quarterfinal in 2007. Wasn’t our own Jonathan Kaplan partly to blame for that as he was running the line that night for Wayne Barnes? So maybe we’re even now…

Okay, enough of this mourning and blaming. It’s time to move on - and for me quite literally too, for the car engine has been switched on and the delights of Auckland and the final two weeks of this World Cup beckon. There is nothing we can do about what happened, we can’t change it.

On second thoughts, and this is me wearing that amateur shrink’s hat once more, maybe we should carry on mourning. What is the point of celebrating our victories if we don’t go into mourning when we lose?

I know I am a bit weird, and am the type who would date the prettiest girl in the school just to experience what it would be like to be dumped by her. But it crossed my mind somewhere on the road to Rotorua that there was something quite beautiful about being in mourning for a sports result. It must mean everything else is going okay.