Why we should enjoy being down

Last weekend was an interesting one in terms of what it showed us about the extremely fine line that there is between success and failure, and between being recognised as a good team or a mediocre one.

The first illustration came on Saturday afternoon at Newlands. For 70 minutes of the match between the Stormers and the Hurricanes, it looked like the long-suffering Cape rugby fans were at last going to have something to crow about.

After the poor performance against the Highlanders the previous week, the Stormers produced a much improved display and dominated the Hurricanes for long portions of the game, where they did everything but score.

Although their inability to cross the line was a concern, and some of us felt at halftime that it may come back to bite them later on, there was enough reason to believe the Stormers would win.

I will even admit that, some 10 minutes from the end, and in an endeavour to make an early start to my work and escape sitting in the Newlands press box in the dark, I started my match report assuming that it would be a Stormers victory. So when Hosea Gear scored that final try, the whole gist of the report had to change.

This in itself says something in that for over an hour there was much to enthuse over, and yet because of one mistake on the part of the Stormers, all of that sweat and toil ultimately came to nothing. The media reports about the Stormers performance were largely negative on Sunday morning, and so they should have been – the Stormers had lost.

More particularly, they had blown it in those final minutes, and this had made the defeat even harder to bear for the local fans. There had been whispers of the “c” word around Newlands in previous weeks, but throwing a game from such a winning position served to confirm it.

The Protea cricket team are the flavour of the month right now, but let’s not forget that the next day they came within a well placed Brett Lee yorker of going through a similar experience.

Make no mistake, even going close to the target of 435 to win against Australia would have been a mighty achievement and would have left us with a lot to be positive about. But had Lee managed to get through Makhaya Ntini when the team needed one more run to draw level, it would undeniably have provided fuel to those who had felt that the South Africans have a problem in the tight ones against the world champions.

They had after all been in a winning position just a few balls previously, and on several occasions in the last hour of the match, the Supersport commentators had stated that the South Africans were in a winning position, only for a wicket to go down immediately afterwards to defy this view.

Had the Proteas lost by one run after such a great and heroic chase, and thus conceded the series after being 2-0 up earlier in the rubber, the post-mortems could well have gone something along the lines that “South Africa still don’t know how to beat Australia”.

That they didn’t was because Ntini got bat to ball and squeezed the ball down to third man for the most important single of his career. All it took for the Stormers to shake off their unwanted choking tag was for one of four defenders to knock Gear into touch. They didn’t, so the tag sticks.

Yet Sunday’s cricket should have provided some glimmer of hope for Stormers fans, for it did confirm again that no bad rut lasts forever, that no matter how dominant one team is over the other, and the Aussies really were dominant over the Proteas on their last visit here in 2002, it does not have to last forever.

There is too much cricketing talent in South Africa for any slump to continue indefinitely, and the rugby administrators in the Cape are going to have to get it horribly wrong if the talent down there is not to at some stage come to the fore and prove conclusively that sporting success and failure works in cycles.

It may not happen now, so the Stormers fans should maybe try to find a way of dealing with defeat. Perhaps the key is to enjoy it in the knowledge that when the Stormers or Western Province finally do get it right, the celebrations will be joyous, as they were at the Wanderers a few days ago.

What we learned on Sunday afternoon, and what English cricket learned after the last Ashes series, is that when the good times come around again, the bad times you have been through tend to only heighten the experience. So maybe the Stormers fans should enjoy these bad times in the knowledge that it will make victory, when it finally does come, and come it will, even if it takes 20 years, so much sweeter.