Here at the sharp end of the World Cup matches aren’t always won by the team with the strongest scrum, the steadiest lineout, or the surest goalkicker, they’re not about how well drilled your defence is, or how dazzling your attack can be, or how clever your set plays are. There are no bad teams in the final four, no easy beats left any more; every one of them can beat the others, and has in recent seasons. The difference between who wins and loses, then, often comes down to something harder to grasp, something which can’t be measured on charts, or plotted on graphs.
When the stakes are this high, the pressure this heavy and the contest this intense, matches are about which team can get the best out of themselves; which team can find the energy in their spent legs to make that break when their side is six points down with a minute to the whistle; which team can find that extra inch of stretch in their fingertips to make the tap tackle to bring the man down as he goes clean through in the 22; which team can throw off their hurt and exhaustion, and force themselves back to their feet quickest so they’re first in position for that very next play.
At that point, Test rugby isn’t about how you play, but why you do. It’s a question of identity, culture, cohesion and belief, and all those other ideas coaches throw around, which are very easy to name but so much harder to explain. This was where the Springbok team had the edge on everyone else in 2019 and may do again this year. There has never been a side in the professional era with a better answer to that fundamental question. ‘Why?’ Never been a team who feel it so deeply, believe it so completely, or can explain it so clearly.
Let everyone else worry about what happened back when South Africa beat England in the final in 2019, Siya Kolisi says. Let everyone else worry about what will happen next weekend, after the semis have been settled, in which South Africa once again meet England. “Our motives are constant, to play for one another, to play for the jersey and to play for the people back home. It will never change.” It’s lucky for England that these games aren’t won by oratory, either.
“I wish you could see all the support back home,” Kolisi says. “This is all that people are talking about, even with everything else happening. Kids in schools are sending us clips of them singing [because they know some of us like singing], people at work on Fridays are wearing green jerseys and the beautiful thing to see is that people who can’t afford them wear anything green, anything to represent the Springboks. We see all that and it continues to motivate us.” Listening to him it feels like the promise of South Africa’s World Cup victory in 1995 has finally been realised.
Kolisi touched on that, too. “We know what the team has meant in the past, not just for our sport but for the country. We use that to inspire us and keep us going. It’s more purposeful when you’re not just doing something for yourself, but for people who you don’t even know and have never met. When you start playing for others and doing things for others. It’s much harder to give up. When you think of how many people would give anything to be where we are now, how many people in our country are unemployed, then giving up and not giving everything wouldn’t just be cheating ourselves, but all those people at home too.”
As Kolisi sees it, his rewards are their rewards, too. “The harder we play, the more we do well, the more we are able to open up opportunities for others. That drives us. We’re a purpose driven team, not a trophy driven team. Of course, the trophies help you, but sometimes you can still look at your struggles, look at what you’re going through and start to feel sorry for yourself. We don’t. We use that pain and those struggles and put them on our shoulders and carry them with us to drive us through the battles.” It is, he says, what “helps us to keep going when it’s tough”.
All this would get a little cloying coming from anyone else. Kolisi, though, who grew up in a township, says it with such heartfelt conviction that it is hard not to be swept along. They have two more games to play in this World Cup, one this weekend and one next, and anyone who wants to beat them will need to come up with their own good answer to that question of what it is, inside, that’s going to get them get up off the floor to make that tackle, to hit that ruck, to get on the end of that pass, when their lungs are burning and their heart is racing and their muscles are aching and their bodies just want to quit.
Because you can be sure about this: Kolisi knows what his answer is. So do his teammates. Their side is exactly the same as the one that beat France last Sunday. They played so well that there was, head coach Jacques Nienaber says, no good reason to change.
