Raise glasses to Biff and Barney

Being a leap year, there were 366 days in 2008, but it was not the extra day on the calendar that made this one appear a special one in terms of the exorcising of demons or hoodoos by South African sports teams and personalities.

In truth it started towards the end of 2007, when the Springboks won the World Cup and the Proteas beat Pakistan on the sub-continent. I am referring to the new South African trend of making a mockery of what we had come to regard as the expected script by reminding some long-time opponents of the truth in that old saying that what goes around comes around.

If Graeme Smith’s men succeed in their objective of recording South Africa’s first ever series win in Australia, it could well be that Perth will go down as a similar moment to the one when an under-strength Springbok team broke a long drought at Twickenham in 2006.

Since that day just over two years ago, England have not come close to their former whipping boys again, and when JP Duminy scored the winning runs in Perth, it was just one day short of a month since the Springboks had condemned England to their biggest ever home defeat.

I was at Twickenham to see it, as I had been to see the Boks get thrashed 53-3 six years earlier. The arrogance of the home team, management and media of 2002 seemed so long ago, and the words that came to my mind as I saw the well beaten England team trudge from the field went something along the lines of “My how the mighty have fallen”.

That is sport, the beauty of it, or the tragedy of it, if you happen to be on the receiving end of such a turn-around. If ever an object lesson was provided on why sports people should always strive as much as possible to remain humble it came at Twickenham in November and Perth in December.

These weren’t the only times that old ghosts were laid to rest in 2008. In July we saw the Springboks end a 10 year drought in New Zealand by winning in Dunedin, and a few weeks later the Proteas completed a memorable series win over England with an epic captain’s innings from Graeme Smith in Birmingham.

The national team that should claim the most populous support in this country, Bafana Bafana, continued to struggle, and the Olympic team bombed quite spectacularly in Beijing, so Trevor Immelman’s first Major triumph was the only other notable South African sporting success away from rugby and cricket.

For my money, the Proteas achievements this year have eclipsed those of the Boks, who were outstanding on some days but battled for consistency overall. For instance, the shock of defeat at Carisbrooke would have been erased from New Zealand memories when they won 19-0 in Cape Town.

The strength of the South African rugby culture is such that you would expect them to always be in the top two of world rugby, and anything less than that is failure. With cricket, I am not quite so sure, and it is clear that the Protea challenge for world supremacy is strongly based around the meticulous planning put in over a long period by the coach and captain.

It is a blue-print not dissimilar to that which won the Springboks the World Cup in 2007, and that the Boks slipped from No1 in the world to No2 this year was chiefly because the foundations that had been built were forsaken during the Tri-Nations season.

Thankfully though by the end of the year the Boks looked to be returning to the successful script, and pivotal to this was the captain John Smit.

Indeed, while there have been great individual performances in both rugby and cricket in 2008, it is impossible to ignore the massive contribution of the two national captains. Smith, or Biff, has led the way with some courageous, heroic innings, and his importance to the Proteas is underlined by his determination to play through the pain barrier.

While it may not have been a great year for the Boks in comparison to 2007, there is a little overlooked statistic that may say everything that needs to be said about the importance of Smit (Barney to his Sharks teammates) to the Bok cause.

Since the defeat in the first Test of the November 2006 series against England, the Boks have lost only one match where Smit has started as captain. The game in question was the first match of this year’s Tri-Nations in Wellington, where the Boks were leading when Smit was forced from the field with an injury that kept him out for the rest of the competition.

All the other defeats in 2007 and 2008 came in matches where Smit was absent, so you could say that Smit has been unbeaten for two years. Smith is building up an equally formidable record, so this is a festive season where South African sport fans should be raising their glasses to Biff and Barney.