Why Singapore fans will cheer on All Blacks in Rugby World Cup final

Albert Camus famously wrote that “everything I know most surely about morality and duty, I owe to football”.

Many sports fans can relate to this sentiment. In my case, almost everything of importance I know about New Zealand and South Africa, I have learnt through their rugby.

Ask any Raffles Institution and St Andrew’s Secondary School alumnus from the 1970s and 1980s, and chances are, he is an All Blacks fan.

Not just because New Zealand are successful and play a very watchable brand of the game, but also because of the Kiwi Cup, a trophy donated by a former New Zealand diplomat that used to be contested annually by the best players of each school.

Many Kiwi coaches would have been enlisted to help the two schools develop their game and would have left an indelible mark. They even performed a version of the haka before their clashes.

There was also, until around 1988, the presence of a New Zealand military forces based in Sembawang, and their units played in the local Singapore leagues.

The military side would be every team’s strongest opponents in the annual Malaysian Rugby Union (MRU) Cup, a quadrangular tournament that also featured Singapore’s national team, Malaysia and Australian Forces North.

That was why Singapore rugby was strong in that era: If you could play against Kiwi soldiers every week, you had little to fear from anyone else in the region.

So there was, for most Singapore rugby fans, respect, admiration and fondness for New Zealand and their rugby.

On the other hand, our contact and knowledge about South Africa was very limited, and what little there was, was much more negative.

I knew, for example, that more than 20 African and Arab countries had withdrawn from the Montreal Olympic Games in 1976 in protest at New Zealand’s sporting links with South Africa and its apartheid policy.

That controversy hit close to home in 1982 when Song Koon Poh, a former Singapore rugby captain and Sportsman of the Year, was chosen to play on a rebel tour to South Africa with a team called Tokkie’s Dragons.

For his involvement in breaching the Gleneagles Agreement, which forbade sporting contact with South Africa, Song earned a life ban that was later lifted.

That awareness of South Africa in turn led me to the highly contentious tour that the Springboks undertook of New Zealand in 1981.

It was a tour that split the country, with one side saying the tour should be allowed because politics and sport should not mix, while the other argued that playing sport with South Africa was as good as endorsing apartheid. The All Blacks won the Test series 2-1.

There was meant to be a return series in South Africa but that was soon blocked under intense political pressure by the NZ government. The players, however, took matters into their own hands and organised a tour of their own in 1986.

The Cavaliers, which was the name they called themselves since they could not use the name All Blacks, lost the series 3-1 against a very strong Springbok side, filled with all-time greats such as Naas Botha, Uli Schmidt, Danie Gerber and Carel du Plessis.

They also lost their captain, Andy Dalton, early in the tour, his jaw broken by a South African opponent.

You see, South African rugby, while highly skilled, was also very hard, brutal and uncompromising. It was the domain of the tough Afrikaner farmer and miner stock mainly, with little room for the whites of British descent, let alone anyone of colour.

Most non-white South Africans in that era usually supported New Zealand when the All Blacks went to play in South Africa.

They were New Zealand’s most difficult rivals: The Kiwis had a winning record against every country in the rugby world – except South Africa.

And it was a record – 20 Springbok wins to the All Blacks’ 18, with three draws, in their 41 matches up to 1994 – that stood until the professional era.

New Zealand then started winning more as South African rugby became weaker because of isolation and the major upheavals the country was undergoing.

Much has changed since those black and white days.

While the All Blacks have increasingly included Maori and Pacific Islands players, the change in racial composition of the Springboks has become more pronounced, especially in the past five years or so.

While they did field one non-white player when they won the World Cup in 1995, winger Chester Williams was a late inclusion because another player was injured, and was largely considered a tokenistic, outsider figure.

When the Springboks won their second World Cup in 2007, the non-white number had risen to two, with wingers Bryan Habana and J.P. Pietersen entrusted with the finishing duties.

Significantly, few of the key playmaking or power positions were filled by black or non-white players in that era.

Things could not be more different now.

When the Springboks won the World Cup four years ago, six of the starters were non-white. The situation is similar this year but now they are also filling some of the key positions, such as fly-half, hooker and fullback, along with both wings.

The leader is a black man, Siya Kolisi, who became captain in 2018.

Which brings us to Saturday’s match,

the teams’ first meeting in a final since their first clash at a World Cup,

when the Springboks upset New Zealand 15-12 in the 1995 final in Johannesburg.

Both sides have won the titles three times, and will have added motivation to make it four.

New Zealand will have a slight edge due to their easier semi-final and extra day’s rest.

A win would mean they have beaten, in successive matches, the three teams that have caused them the most grief over the past two years: Ireland, Argentina and South Africa.

A win for the Springboks, on the other hand, shows they have played all the other top six teams in the world rankings – New Zealand, Ireland, France, Scotland and England – to be the best in the world.

And South Africa are aiming to be only the second team to retain the Webb Ellis trophy – no prizes for guessing who were the first.

Knowing what I knew about the country, and being appalled by the injustices of apartheid, watching rugby for a long time meant supporting anyone but South Africa.

But not, I am glad to say, any longer.

May the better team win.