The most entertainment to be had this weekend was on Saturday, certainly; just not at Coca-Cola Park. No, the rugby took second place to watching Jeremy Clarkson and the Top Gear team building stretch limousines out of ordinary cars, and then try and drive them through London to get a trio of celebrities to the Brit Awards. The results were hilarious; watching a red Fiat Panda longer than a London bus trying to weave through traffic made for compelling viewing.

Also hilarious was Peter de Villiers's latest barrage of quotes; more on those in a moment. First, a doffed cap to a Springbok team who produced a quite remarkable afternoon's rugby. South African rugby lives in a world of extremes, with no middle ground whatsoever: we're either floating or suicidal. A week ago the team was booed off the field; now they're being lauded after a splendid display of running rugby that seemed to come out of nowhere. Even in the rollercoaster world of South African sport, it was quite a turnaround.

Friday night's Captain's Table dinner featured multiple big names — Phil Kearns, Tiaan Strauss, David Campese, Greg Clark, Greg Martin, Schalk Burger Senior (who's starting to look eerily like Don King) — and sentiment from the expert collective matched the general opinion flowing through rugby circles last week: the Boks were poor, the coaching was questionable, and while the Wallabies were a particularly strong side playing fine rugby, South Africa hadn't done an awful lot to make life difficult for them. Predictions for the return game? Close game, with most people leaning towards Australia. Another gloomy afternoon for South African rugby, then.

And we go and put 50 points on the board in a crushing victory.

Along with the obvious elation, it's hard not to feel a little perplexed by it all. Yes, we all pointed to the same areas of concern after Durban — ball retention, tactical kicking, support at the breakdown — and yes, they were mostly simple, basic concepts. But to turn around quite so comprehensively in the space of seven days has elicited plenty of disbelief, to the extent that conspiracy theories are darting through inboxes, questioning the Wallaby commitment to a dead game.

That would be doing a disservice to the Australians; more importantly, it's hardly fair to a Springbok side that got an awful lot right on Saturday afternoon. Jongi Nokwe's haul of tries put a glamorous seal on the hard work the rest of the team put in, hard work inspired by a week of public crucifixion, and the very real threat of losing all three home games in the Tri-Nations. The delight is how well Springbok teams respond when backed into a corner; the dismay is how often they find themselves there in the first place.

That said, the illustration of how this team is capable of playing is hugely reassuring, even if Saturday's euphoria is tempered this morning by the question of whether such a performance can be sustained. In the cynical world we inhabit, the team's stock has risen, but the coach's hasn't necessarily followed suit, with the end of year tour looming as a yardstick of public faith in De Villiers. The sceptics have ascribed Saturday's win to the players rather than a week of coaching brilliance; if the team has some convincing still to do, then that applies in even greater measure to the coach.

His post-match comments don't help his cause, each performance lending greater weight to the theory that De Villiers is actually a running Monty Python sketch. The Australian media have had a field day with Saturday's Biblical allusions (unconfirmed rumours suggest De Villiers turned a bottle of Evian into lightly wooded chenin blanc after the match, and then proceeded to feed Coca Cola Park with just three wholewheat rolls and a can of shredded tuna), and while he's marvellously entertaining (if largely unintelligible), his meandering soliloquies hardly help his image.

What will help that image is a team that produces more results like Saturday's, and so, while the Tri-Nations isn't quite done yet, our attention moves to Europe, and the squad De Villiers will take for what is looming as a make-or-break tour. A beleaguered team needed the win over the Wallabies desperately, and it showed; desperation is hardly the motivating force you want to draw from. Saturday illustrated what this team can do; whether they can do it again will determine just how long Peter de Villiers continues to light up post-match proceedings.

  • Contact Dan at dan@metropolis.co.za
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