Too much of a good thing can be overkill

PEOPLE might think it’s arrogant,” said Rian Oberholzer, the chief executive of the Springbok domain, just the other day, “but we think it’s the greatest rivalry in rugby.”

- CHRIS HEWETT

Try as we might in this nonconformist corner of the paper, it’s difficult to mount an argument against either assertion. No one in the union code has a deeper-seated superiority complex than the reigning world champions; Tests between South Africa and New Zealand are the high peaks of the sport.

There are very good reasons to rejoice in the idea of the Boks and the All Blacks resuming “proper” tours and series, staged over a period of weeks rather than mere days and adding fresh chapters to a narrative stretching back to 1921, when the celebrated No.8 “Boy” Morkel and significant numbers of his extended family crossed the high seas for a 19-match trek around the Land of the Long White Cloud, from Auckland in the north to Invercargill in the south.

Younger readers may be interested to know that for the most part, meetings between the two countries in the amateur era were, as night followed day, bigger, better, more captivating and more intense than anything else on offer in the 15-man game, including those involving the Lions. The great moments loom large in the elderly mind’s eye, even for those of us who weren’t around to witness them at first hand – weren’t even alive when they occurred, in some instances. How? Because the great rugby chroniclers wrote about them so vividly, they might have happened in our back yards.