Erratic Natal can still spike big guns

Press, 13 May 1986, Page 36

Erratic Natal can still spike big guns

The touring Cavaliers will tomorrow morning meet Natal, the mildly erratic team of South African rugby. Like the little girl in the poem, when it is good it can be very, very good, but when it is bad it really can be horrid.

The great days of Natal rugby, especially those when Tommy Bedford, its outspoken captain, was busily in action, seemed to have gone.

Natal is now in the B section of the Currie Cup, somewhere near the top of the second six teams in the republic but not likely to be consistent enough to move into the top six. Yet every now and then Natal will, with its adventurous rugby, uncork an absolutely smashing game which is likely to spike big guns, such as Northern Transvaal and Western Province. Bedford, not a sharpshooting newspaper columnist, still refers to Natal as Last Outpost — what he regards as the last outpost of the British Empire. This does not impress people in high places in South African rugby but Bedford goes blithely on. Whether Natal will go blithely on tomorrow morning remains to be seen.

Anyone living within 100 miles of Durban will tell you that their fullback, Hugh Reece-Ed-wards, is the best fullback in South Africa.

Evidently, Reece-Ed-wards proved this in the recent Springbok trial when he outplayed Johan Heunis, the Springbok’s full-back at Newlands. Then it has a character of a wing in Cliffie Brown, who has tried his luck in football, amateur or otherwise, in the United States and Britain.

Not many people say quite the same complimentary things about the Natal forwards. Andre Botha, a 6ft Bin lock, is warmly regarded. The rest, according to local opinion, can be very good when the mood takes them or truly awful. There has been a strong Australasian attitude to Natal rugby, begun a good many, years ago by Dick Cocks, the Australian loose forward of the early 1970 s and on through the Wallably Mark Loane and then the New Zealanders, Murray Mexted and Craig Ross.

Natal does not have any immigrants on board tomorrow. They evidently intend to play their favourite wideranging style of rugby. It might just be one of those days, if the very much Cavaliers B side does not knit together, when Natal will strike one of their purple patches. The teams are:

Natal: Hugh Reece-Ed-wards (captain); Cliffie Brown, Des McLean, Ronnie Haarhoff, Tony Watson, Henry Coxwell; Craig Jamieson; Nick Veldsman; Rob Hankinson, Cliff Hopkins, Peter Edmunds, Andre Botha; Allan Heuer, Graham Hefer, Deon du Toit. Cavaliers: Robbie Deans; Bernie Fraser, Steve Pokere, Bryce Robins, Bill Osborne, Wayne Smith; Dave Loveridge; Wayne Shelford; Alan Whetton, Gary Whetton, Albert Anderson, Jock Hobbs (captain); Steve McDowell, John Mills, Scott Crichton.