Luke CAN turn it around

Just to start out on a point of accuracy – Luke Watson was not the first Stormers or Western Province player to be booed by a Newlands crowd.

The memory of De Wet Barry, when he was the captain of the Stormers just a couple of years ago, being roundly booed by his team’s fans is a relatively recent one. So is that of the flak taken at the ground by former Stormers coaches Gert Smal and Kobus van der Merwe.

Smal and Van der Merwe both related stories during their time as Stormers coaches of abuse they took at restaurants or even at traffic lights the day after a poor home performance from the team. I can’t claim to understand it, it is only sport after all, but it does happen, and in the Watson case on Sunday, perhaps it wasn’t quite as bad as some who weren’t at Newlands may be assuming.

Yes, there were some boos ringing out the first time Watson touched the ball, and again subsequently, and it is unlikely anyone would argue against a contention the Stormers loose-forward was the first home player to be jeered or booed while scoring a try.

But it wasn’t as if the people in the crowd were frothing at the mouth and working themselves into a state of apoplexy, threatening to express their anger by invading the pitch. The thing about the boo sound is that it does get heard, so even a small pocket of people booing can sometimes lead to a generalisation like the one peddled on Sunday that “the Newlands crowd booed Luke Watson”.

It would have been more accurate to say that “a section” or “sections of the Newlands crowd” booed Luke Watson, for when he scored that try I could also hear a lot of cheering. Which probably just about sums up the attitude to Watson in the Cape – some love him, some hate him, there is not a lot of middle ground.

And this is something that Watson is going to have to accept given that, wittingly or otherwise, he has publicly expressed views on an emotive and divisive issue, one that a lot of people, Stormers supporters or not, feel very strongly about. His vomit on the jersey image is even making it into the scripts of local television sit-coms (a recent episode of Coconuts), and it would have been naive for Watson or any of his supporters to think that it was just going to be forgotten about.

I hate booing, I think it is crass, bad mannered and idiotic. But then as I do not number among the paying patrons at rugby matches, it is not my place, as a member of the press, to pontificate or preach on how dissatisfied customers should voice their displeasure at the product they are presented with.

Of course, in the Watson instance, it was not the product the people were protesting about, but what the individual said and the controversy it gave rise to. And knowing that it was his words that gave rise to the enmity towards him makes it easy to find a solution, for there is another current resident of Cape Town who has handed Watson an object lesson on how it should and should not be done.

I have always admired Graeme Smith, but he has not always been everyone’s favourite South African, and he was reviled by many of his countrymen and the Australians when, in an attempt to take pressure off his teammates, he shot his mouth off ahead of the Proteas series Down Under in 2006.

He has subsequently admitted it was a mistake, and on the most recent tour he completely turned the Aussie public to the point that, by the final test in Sydney, he was probably the most respected and admired foreign cricketer to visit those shores in a good few decades.

Smith did it by showing great courage in the face of adversity, but also, most importantly, by doing all of his talking on the field. If Watson saves his talking for where it matters most, between those white lines, and reproduces the form that has made him an asset to the Stormers and WP in the past, the jeers will soon be drowned out by the cheering.