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The dark day that spun Breyton into voluntary amnesia

rugby25 April 2019 09:01| © Cycle Lab
By:JJ Harmse
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Bulls v Stormers © Gallo Images

For Bretyon Paulse the 2005 north/south Super Rugby derby between the Stormers and the Bulls at Loftus should have been a special day in his playing career, one that he would remember for a long time.

As it turned out, he did return to South Africa to play a bit for the Stormers two years later, but at the time it was his swansong as he brought down the curtain on a stellar career with the Cape team. It was the same with coach Gert Smal. The visit to Pretoria was his last involvement until he returned several years later as Western Province’s director of rugby.

But while it was supposed to be a memorable day for Paulse, it turned out to be anything but that. He remembers the score from that game. Almost any Bulls or Stormers fan who was there or who watched it on television would, and so would the players. From a Cape rugby perspective, infamous would be a good way to describe that day, and the score is deeply etched into memories. In the same way that a festering sore is etched into your head. The Bulls won 75-14.

Ask Paulse to speak about the game itself though, and his memories of it, and you draw a blank. He’s moved onto a career in television so has the ability to tell a story, to engage the listener. But that Loftus game in 2005? Forget it.

"Maybe I just don’t want to be reminded of it. I think that is the sort of game that as a player you just blank out, you erase from your memory," says Paulse.

"I am trying to remember why we got so badly klapped that day. Were we particularly poor that year? I don’t recall that we were. We had some good players in our team. Do you remember the background to it? All I can remember is that it was my last game before I went to Clermont-Auvergne in France for two seasons. It was Gert’s last game too. We kicked off, they scored. We kicked off and they scored again. That sequence just kept repeating itself. That is all I can remember.

"Gus Theron did score a very good try. He was playing on the other wing. But apart from that I just remember having to tackle. To tackle and tackle and tackle. Obviously we didn’t get that right or they wouldn’t have scored 75 points. You don’t want to remember a game like that. It was very bad, particularly as the Bulls were our arch-rivals. I've blanked it out."

AN INTENSE AND FURIOUS RIVALRY

That is the thing that hurt the Cape players and fans more than anything else. Maybe against another team such a humiliation might have been something that could be lived with, gotten over in time. But against the Bulls? No ways.

And particularly not at that time. The Stormers had enjoyed a long sequence of success against the Bulls when they arrived at Loftus on that clear autumn highveld afternoon.

"It was my first north/south derby after moving back to the Cape and I had looked forward to the game. The other players told me we always beat the Bulls, and at the time we had won about five in a row," recalls Hanyani Shimange, who played hooker for the Stormers that day.

So maybe there was a bit of complacency?

"Yes, that is probably correct, I distinctly remember one of the other players telling me that we always beat the Bulls."

There should never have been that complacency as the Bulls were playing for a place in their first Super Rugby semifinal, while the Stormers were finishing that season well off the pace. The Bulls had more to play for, but it is true that the Stormers boasted an excellent Super Rugby record against the Bulls.

They often beat them quite well too, and in games where sometimes the Bulls started with high hopes. In a 2004 game between the teams at Newlands, the Stormers had unexpectedly outfoxed the excellent Bulls lineout, with lock Wilhelm Steenkamp summing up the home team’s dominance by trampling all over Victor Matfield’s scrum cap after a lineout towards the end of the game.

For some reason the Currie Cup was different, for the Blue Bulls did win a few domestic trophies in those years, but when the Western Province players changed from the blue and white hoops into Stormers colours, the balance of power titled overwhelmingly in their favour.

Indeed, while 2004 was the only year that Smal managed to guide the Stormers into a semifinal, he did also boast an excellent record in Super Rugby (it was then still the Super 12) against fellow South African teams. I can recall in the build-up to that game making a lot of the fact that Smal was unbeaten against local teams, a record he was proud of.

AN ATMOSPHERE AKIN TO WAR

Perhaps it was that complacency coming out of the Cape, something the Bulls coach Heyneke Meyer would have told his players was arrogance, that provoked such fury from the Bulls players. It may be apocryphal, but the legend that somehow made it’s way down the nearly 2000 kilometres of the N1 freeway to Cape Town was that the Bulls coach would inspire his players with Boer War imagery, would paint the Stormers players as a bunch of arrogant, soft show-ponies who believed they were superior to everyone else.

A Bulls player from that era has subsequently confirmed in conversation that the build-up to a match against the Stormers was sometimes conducted in an atmosphere that would have befitted a key battle in a war rather than just a sporting event.

The Bulls players were encouraged to hate their opponents, and it had had a spill-over at the Springboks in 2003. The incident where Bulls Bok lock Geo Cronje refused to share a room with his WP counterpart Quinton Davids during a Bok training camp prior to the World Cup squad announcement will be remembered for it’s racial connotations, but some who were there swear that provincial orientation might have had much more to do with it.

"We just hated the Stormers. They were our sworn enemy," said the player.

There were many things that happened on and off the field back then that might have combined together to provoke the Bulls into behaving like the animals represented by their emblem rampaging through the streets of a Spanish city. For instance, a key player for the Stormers back then was Luke Watson, who because he wore on his sleeve and was never inclined to what some rugby people at the time might have liked to be the popular view, was booed whenever he ventured through the gates of Loftus.

CAPE TOWN TOFFS GOT GIVEN PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT

And then there was the perception that because the Stormers were based in the Cape, which was also where you would find the SA Rugby headquarters, the players from the region were preferred when it came to Bok selection.

"One thing I remember very clearly from that 75-14 game was Pedrie Wannenburg, the Bulls No 8, chasing Joe van Niekerk around the field because Joe was the incumbent Bok in that position," recalls Shimange.

The mood of the time, and perhaps the mood of the time, with the Pretoria rugby community feeling they were prejudiced against while the Cape players were favoured, can be picked up in the following words from an article that appeared in the Afrikaans newspaper, Die Beeld, after the Bulls had thumped the Stormers and a Bok squad had been announced.

"The scoreboard at Loftus said Bulls 75, Stormers 14, yet Jake White's Springbok scoreboard says: Stormers 10, Bulls 8… Only two of the Bulls backs were deemed good enough to make the group, while six Stormers players made it. And that after the Bulls had beaten the Stormers 75-14 at Loftus on Saturday."

AN AMBUSH AND ABJECT HUMILIATION

For Shimange, it was easily the worst day of his rugby career, at least in Super Rugby, and a humiliation and embarrassment that unlike Paulse, he clearly hasn’t shaken completely from his mind.

"We were very laid back with our approach to the game, but we ran into an ambush," said the former Springbok hooker.

"I had been there with Free State in the Currie Cup, but it was my first Stormers/Bulls game, and it was very different. The bus trip was delayed a bit by traffic, just like was the case with the Stormers before their game this year, but no-one seemed too concerned. Then we came around the corner into a street near Loftus, I think it is called Park Street, and we were confronted by a sea of blue.

"The Bulls were resurgent at that time after a lean period previously, and they had massive support. In those days Loftus was nearly full for every game, it was like a test match. Because of our previous successes up there we thought it was just going to happen.

"But in the game itself the Bulls just never stop coming at us. They were very aggressive, their kicking game was better than ours, Kees Lensing taught us a lesson in the scrums. In the breakdowns it felt like their were 30 Bulls guys flying in. I remember being badly smashed by Richard Bands.

"We kept ending up on the floor with the Bulls players standing over us, pointing at us. It was one of those games where we were just overwhelmed. It felt like we were non-existent. It was one of those days where somehow it just seemed hotter than usual, we felt more tired. We just wanted the game to end. I remember being replaced by Lukas van Biljon later in the game and being relieved it was over. Our change-room afterwards resembled a hospital ward."

BULLS LIKED MAKING IT PERSONAL

Shimange recalls the Bulls being particularly ferocious and angry, and reckons that one of Meyer’s many gifts as a coach might have been that he never let the facts get in the way of good motivation.

"The one things the Bulls were very good at was making it personal. One of the things they were told was that we all lived in Camps Bay, that we lived easy lives looking out at the sea sipping cocktails at sunset," he said.

"Meantime half of us lived in Stellenbosch, and most nowhere near the mountain. So I think they made up their own truths to psyche themselves up. They made out that Schalk thought he was a sort of super-hero and that they needed to teach him a lesson, Luke (Watson) was in our team and they hated him for their own reasons. They painted us as Cape Town softies who needed to be cut down to size."

MALLETT BLOWS HIS TOP

If the Bulls didn’t cut them down to size, their furious director of rugby Nick Mallett did. There are many stories that have survived over the past 14 years and perhaps been embellished on about what Mallett told the Stormers and their coaches in the Loftus change room. Shimange was there and he says there’s been a lot of exaggeration, but he also says that whatever the players were told, they had it coming to them.

"Nick arrived in the change room very hot, understandably so. That’s fair given what we had dished up," says Shimange.

"He gave us a proper talking to and we deserved it. With the team that we had we should have done much better. It was Gert’s last game as coach and that made it even more disappointing as we felt we had let a good man down, as well as the assistant coach Carel du Plessis. Both were very decent men who didn’t deserve to bow out on such a humiliating note.

"I have heard a lot of stories about what happened in that changeroom, including that Nick and Gert nearly fought, but that is not the truth. It has been exaggerated through time. But we were a disgrace that day, Nick told us that, and there was nothing he said that was untrue or unfair.

"Just look at the team we had. Luke became a Springbok later, Schalk was a Springbok, Joe van Niekerk was a Springbok, myself, Faan Rautenbach, Neil de Kock, Werner Greeff, I think Jean de Villiers was there too… On paper just as good as the Bulls but attitude wise we just weren’t on the same park. You can hardly blame Nick for blowing his top."

THE SEQUEL - NICK BLOWS HIS TOP AGAIN

?The former Springbok coach had a good reason to blow his top a year later too. Again, like in 2005, the game was the final league match of the season. This time the game was at Newlands. It was a chance for the Stormers to atone for their humiliation. The Bulls were vying for a semifinal place with the Sharks, and it looked like their chances of making had been killed off by a big Sharks win over the Western Force in Durban the previous night.

The Bulls needed more than a 30 point winning margin over the Stormers to secure a play-off place at the Sharks' expense. Surely that was impossible? The Stormers couldn’t possibly lose by a big margin again, not on their home field. Or so it was thought. Bulls coach Meyer had other ideas. Legend has it that he wrote down a number on a blackboard. He told the players that was what they needed to win by. They did. The Stormers were again just not at the races.

"Nick came into the change room after that game and gave us the same speech that he had made at Loftus the year before," recalls Shimange.

"He told us that there had been no improvement in a year. We had lost by a big margin on our home ground. He said it was no different to Loftus. And he was right then too. By then Kobus (van der Merwe) was the coach."

STAND BY FOR MORE REVENGE AND FURY

Van der Merwe lasted until the following Super Rugby season before a player revolt removed him. Gary Gold replaced him on an interim basis in the Currie Cup before Rassie Erasmus moved to the Cape at the end of 2007. It was Erasmus who started the Stormers’ resurgence and for a while the balance of power in the north/south derbies tilted back towards the south.

For instance the Bulls will come to Newlands on Saturday for the latest instalment of the biggest rivalry in South African rugby not having won in Cape Town (in Super Rugby) since 2011. But there’s a new wound that has been opened. The 40-3 defeat at Loftus in February wasn’t as bad as the 75-14 of 14 years earlier, but it hurt the Cape players as much. Not for the first time there will be a team going into one of these derby matches hell-bent on revenge and not just a little fury to motivate them.

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