Invictus - Carlin [106]
The last piece of pageantry before the game began was the All Blacks’ traditional Haka. The team had been performing this ritual before the start of international matches for more than a hundred years. It was a Maori war dance designed to instill terror in enemy ranks. The fifteen All Blacks would stand in the middle of the playing field in broad formation, each man spreading his legs wide apart in a half crouch. At a cry from the captain, the dance would begin. Amid much snarling and sticking out of tongues, great stomping, thigh-slapping, chest-puffing, and menacing gesticulation generally, the All Blacks uttered a chant that sounded far more alarming in the bellowed Maori original than it does on a page in English translation: The rousing finale went:
Tēnei te tangata pāhuruhuru
Nāna nei i tiki mai whakawhiti te rā
Ā upane, ka upane
Ā upane, ka upane
Whiti te rā, hī!
This the hairy man that stands here
Who brought the sun and caused it to shine
A step upward, another step upward
A step upward, another step upward! The sun shines!
Fortunately for the All Blacks, their rivals do not usually have the translation ready at hand. What rivals tend at do is try to stare them down, or smirk with seeming contempt, or feign indifference. None of which are ever entirely convincing, so hypnotically menacing is the spectacle. On this occasion, though, there was a slight, but significant, break with protocol. Halfway through the performance, which lasts about a minute and twenty seconds, Jonah Lomu broke with the pattern of the dance and started advancing slowly but pointedly, eyes staring, toward James Small. But then something happened that few people in the stadium or watching on TV saw, but every player on the field registered. Kobus Wiese, standing next to Small, broke protocol himself and took two or three steps in Lomu’s direction, cutting diagonally in front of Small. “Kobus broke the line as if to say to Lomu, ‘To get to him, you have to get through me first,’ ” was how Pienaar remembered it. They were small gestures from two big men, infantile ones in the broader scheme of the day’s events, but they had their impact. Even before the referee’s whistle signaled the start of the game, it was Springboks 1, Lomu 0.
If the focus of Springbok fans was on James Small, the greater pressure was on Stransky. Because of the nature of the position he played, the kicking job, spotlight would be more on him than on any other individual player. François Pienaar and Kobus Wiese could, to a degree, hide within the grunting hurly-burly of the forward scrum. If they made a mistake, few outside the team or the sphere of expert pundits would necessarily notice. The bad news was that, by the same token, they rarely received the credit they deserved. What Stransky did or did not do, on the other hand, absolutely nobody missed. His position at fly half was the most visible in the team. But he was also the player in charge of taking the kicks, and it was often on whether a kick went over and through the goalposts—with the two points or, more often, three points that went with it—that the outcome of a game turned. If the kick sailed true, you were a hero. If it did not, you ran the risk of eternal ignominy or, in the best of cases, endless self-recrimination, like a soccer player who misses a penalty. And, like a soccer player in such circumstances, so much turned on so little. The difference between glory and disaster lay in a subtle change in the direction of the wind, in almost microscopic movements of the muscles, tendons, and nerves in the ankle, the knee, the hip, the toe.
Rugby can be a spectacular game to watch, even for people not familiar with its intricacies. It combines the tactics, power, and