Invictus - Carlin [108]
The problem was that the South Africans did not score any tries either. The All Black line held as firm as the Springbok one. It really was the sporting equivalent of the First World War—no breakthroughs, lines doggedly held, shells lobbed from one side to the other. It was a game decided by kicks. Penalty kicks and dropkicks, worth three points apiece, accounted for all the day’s scoring.
By halftime Joel Stransky had bisected the posts with his boot three times, while Andrew Mehrtens, the All Blacks’ fly half, had done so twice. The score when they stopped at the end of the first forty minutes for the statutory ten-minute break was 9-6 to South Africa. But Mehrtens equalized in the second half and regular play ended, in a mood of excruciating tension, in which everything could have gone one way or the other at any moment, with the scores level at 9-9. For the first time in a Rugby World Cup, the game had to go into overtime, two halves of ten minutes each. No player on the field had ever crossed this threshold. Physically and mentally they were exhausted. But the fans were suffering more, Mandela not least, even if—in common with most of the fresh black converts around the country—he missed some of the finer points of the action. “He did not know that much about the game, but enough to follow it,” recalled gruff Louis Luyt, sitting next to him. “He would ask me questions, ‘That penalty kick, what was it for?’ But, boy, was he tense! Tense as hell! On a knife edge!”
Mandela did not hesitate to corroborate Luyt’s impression of how he was feeling. “You don’t know what I went through that day! You don’t know!” he said, speaking for all of his compatriots. “I’d never seen a rugby match where there was no try scored. All penalties, or dropkicks. I had never seen a thing like this. But when they decided, now, to give us ten more minutes, I felt like fainting. Honestly, I have never been so tense.”
Morné du Plessis, himself a veteran of a hundred rugby battles, felt like fainting too as he imagined himself in the players’ shoes. “This was far more than a rugby game, remember, and they all knew it—it was like sending a group of soldiers who have just been through the trauma of the battlefield, and then sending them immediately back in again, straight to the front line.”
Pienaar, the twenty-eight-year-old general, reminded his teammates of their higher purpose in the interval before play resumed. “Look around you,” he told his weary troops. “See those flags? Play for those people. This is one chance. We have to do this for South Africa. Let’s be world champions.”
But his eloquence did not stop the All Blacks from going ahead with a Mehrtens kick just one minute into the restart. New Zealand was 12-9 ahead, but as the tenth minute approached, just as the halftime whistle was about to blow, Stransky popped another penalty kick high and straight between the posts. It was 12-12. The whistle blew for halftime, and five minutes later, the leaden-legged players resumed battle, for one last time. The ten final minutes of the game.
“A few days before the final, Kitch Christie [the team coach] had said to me, ‘Don’t forget about drop goals,’” Joel Stransky recalled. “And that made me practice drop goals for the couple of days leading up to the big game. Lucky I did.
“I can only remember three of the five kicks I kicked that day. The last kick was one of them. Seven minutes to go, the score still at 12-12. We had a scrum twenty-five yards out from their line. François called for a back-row move. One that we had practiced over and over.”
That meant the forwards trying to make a rush through the dense All Black lines for a try. “But Joel canceled my call,” said Pienaar. “He said he wanted the ball immediately.” So that was what they did. As Wiese recalled, “Joel needed a specific kind of scrum, we had to wheel in a particular direction, to do his drop-goal. We were very tired, but we tried it and it worked.”
The ball emerged from the human thicket of the scrum and Joost van der Westhuizen, the scrum half, the link between