They Are Here and They Belong | Sporting Action

The Springbok Women's Awakening

By Koketso Mamabolo

The Black Ferns have won as many World Cups as the Springbok Women have played in. When the teams lined up for the quarter-final, the South Africans had never recorded a win against that juggernaut of women’s rugby, the six-time World Cup winners. Just hours before, halfway across the world, the four-time men’s champions had humbled the Black Ferns’ countrymen, the All Blacks, with their biggest ever defeat. The stage was set.

With South Africa’s professor of attacking rugby – whose blueprints always seemed more of a tip of the hat to their flair from Down Under than the trademark physical South African style he’d embraced as a caretaker coach for the women’s side – guiding things, many hoped the Springbok Women could pull off one of the greatest upsets in the sports history.

Coach Swys de Bruin had taken inspiration from the magician Rassie Erasmus before with a 6 - 2 split, like many other coaches around the world, but for this game he went even deeper into the great innovators bag of tricks with the even more controversial 7 - 1 split. Rassie first deployed it against New Zealand for that unforgettable World Cup warm-up match in 2023 which, coincidentally, was when the Springbok Men had recorded the previous record win over the All Blacks.

The name of the stadium, Sandy Park, seemed so apt when Swys de Bruin’s game plan became clear within minutes of kickoff. The Springbok Women set out to make the game a slow, hard slog, to suffocate the Black Ferns, with their 10-woman plus two style taken up a notch, to make it feel like running a marathon on the beach while getting pelted by waves. “Leave nothing on the field. We will carry you off if you are too tired to walk at the end of it,” said de Bruin to the team before the match. “This is the biggest game of your life, go out and enjoy it.”

For the first half, the centre held, things did not fall apart. The ball looked like it would never go past the centres, it stayed among the heavy-hitters, the wrecking ball that is Babalwa Latsha, the rampaging Aseza Hele, the relentless Danelle Lochner, the imperious midfield pairing of Aphiwe Ngwevu and Zintle Mphupa.

Before the Italy game two weeks prior, flyhalf Libbie Janse van Rensburg had given the warning: “We [had] a job, we said we were going to be direct - this is what South Africa is about.” And when the 14 and 15-player lineouts, with utility backs Nadine Roos and Byhandré Dolf doing their best impressions of Victor Matfield as lineout jumpers, and the mauls, engineered off the side of scrums, had stunned everyone at Sandy Park it seemed as though maybe the Black Ferns would fall apart, that the 10 - 10 deadlock would end in South Africa doing the unthinkable.

Hard-earned tries from Latsha and Ngwevu kept the dream alive. The tale of two halves is one of the gifts of sport but can also be of great torment. Before Swys de Bruin and his trusty lieutenants had even returned to the coaches box the levy broke. Within a matter of minutes it seemed as though the Black Ferns had left the Springboks trudging in the sand and decided to run on water instead. In the end, the centre, and wings, and fullback, and everyone scrambling to defend, could not hold.

But after eighty minutes, after South Africa had given New Zealand arguably their first real test in the tournament, after one of the most physically demanding contests in sport, the two teams sang and danced together. Competitors from the first whistle, members of a burgeoning community, a family or whānau in Māori, after the final whistle.

Perhaps due to the growing rivalry between Ireland and South Africa it’s poignant that the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats’ poem does not fit neatly into this narrative. These Springbok Women are the best to have worn the jersey, conviction is something they do not lack, and the passionate intensity is on display in droves.

The Arrival

“I’ve been blessed [with] 38 years in professional rugby. I've never worked with a team like this. It’s just a bunch of fighters. I cry every day [with pride]. It’s just unreal how they never moan, they just go, go, go,” said de Bruin at the post-match conference. This sentiment was echoed by former captain and legend of the local game, Mandisa Williams, and Stanley Raubenheimer, who coached the women’s national side for four years.

They know all about the foundations that had to be laid, about the pioneers who came before, about the struggle for recognition and support through an amateur era, and what it took for this group of women in particular to get to where they are. Williams broke new ground as part of the side that went to South Africa’s first World Cup in 2006, led by first-ever captain of the Springbok Women, Nomsebenzi Tsotsobe. Raubenheimer gave many of the players in this squad their first international caps.

“There is something special about this group - we come from different backgrounds and all of us have different stories on how rugby shaped our lives,” said veteran captain Nolusindiso Booi, who played alongside current scrum coach Laurian Johannes-Haupt when the Springboks last met the Black Ferns at the 2010 tournament in a 55 - 5 drubbing.

It’s this collage of individual stories, and the willingness to fight and do it with pride, discipline and joy, along with a first time playoff spot and a top 10 world ranking, that make another loss to defending champs easier to swallow. There’s a sense of expectation, a growing respect for a group of women who wear the green and gold with pride.

“I think it’s all about the difference they made for the people back home. [They’re] role models and it's just unreal,” said de Bruin after the loss. As sportswriter Lungani Zama noted, the women’s game does not have a talent pipeline that’s over a century old like the men’s game and its elite rugby schools. Instead coaches and selectors in South Africa have drawn from a broader pool of established sportswomen and undiscovered talents and this side is no exception.

“It is a motley crew of former athletes, cricketers, netballers, footballers, teachers and everyday humans who have an interest in the game,” writes Zama.

The team’s Swiss Army Knife and arguably the most talented player, Nadine Roos, was a hurdler who competed at the 15th Crossfit Games. Danelle Lochner played netball for the national team and became a Springbok after less than a year of playing rugby. Zintle Mphupa played cricket for the SA U19 side. Aseza Hele was working at a petrol station when her netball career stalled and started training with a local rugby team just to keep fit.

Just five years ago the now 31-year-old Babalwa Latsha, the intimidating but gentle soul of a tighthead prop who has captained the side on a few occasions, became the first African woman in Africa to turn professional.

Until recently the handful of overseas-based players who followed in Latsha’s footsteps were the only professionals in the setup, and the Bulls Daisies contingent, who form part of the country’s first professional women’s club, now dominate the composition of the team the same way they’ve dominated the domestic women’s league.

The work that former Irish international Lynne Cantwell put in as women’s high performance manager during Rassie Erasmus’ time as Director of Rugby is bearing fruit. She built the league the Daisies are dominating and the work of establishing structures and engineering a talent pipeline is being pushed even further by Dave Wessels and Francois Davids, SA Rugby’s high performance manager and vice president respectively.

The number of licensed players almost doubled between 2021 and 2024 and plans for a new league that will take the domestic women’s game into a professional era are firmly under way.

Nolusindiso Booi leaves the game in a better place than when she found it. That marvelous servant of the game who has seen the highs and lows through four World Cup campaigns. Between sharing his worldly knowledge of the game and ‘dad’ jokes, Swys de Bruin apparently spends a lot of time talking about miracles.

Booi has seen miracles. She has guided the next generation who are already guiding the one to come. They’ve made their presence known. “We are here and we belong here.”

A little English boy brought ferocious ball-carrier Aseza Hele, from the Eastern Cape, to tears after asking her to swap jerseys with him. She couldn’t believe that she could touch the life of someone so far away from home. A giant on the field, even she couldn’t see what’s over the horizon, what Swys de Bruin thinks is happening: the beginning of a new age.

Sources: News24 | Supersport | Daily Maverick | SA Rugby | World Rugby | Rugby World Cup