It's time captain Siya Kolisi started a charm offensive with the referees.
Referee Luke Pearce gives a yellow card to Siya Kolisi of the Springboks during the Rugby Championship match against Australia recently. The Boks have been on the wrong side of the law a fair bit recently. Picture: Matt Roberts/Getty Images
It’s a stereotype of course , but it’s funny how, almost as surely as night follows day, South Africa win a World Cup or are the best team in the world and the narrative from overseas begins that the way they play the game is bad for rugby. But now, the referee and his viewpoint are now an important part of an international team’s preparation for a match. And it is probably fair to say the current Springbok team is having a hard time with how referees are perceiving them at the moment, judging by Rassie Erasmus’s notorious video and the number of calls that seem to be going against them at the moment.
Probably the last time the Springboks faced such a PR crisis was between the 1995 and 2003 World Cups. As Smit built a rapport with the referees around the world and White clamped down hard on any on-field ill-discipline, so the Springboks’ reputation improved and they began to get more of the 50/50 calls.