ON THE BALL: It is only fair that Nic White should be thanked for his invaluable contribution to making our Springbok team the most motivated we have seen for a long time, writes Lucky Maree.
The old saying goes, rugby is a game for hooligans played by gentlemen, and there are certain gentlemanly rules that no player should break.
One of them is faking an injury to get a penalty. Another, just as important, is you really have to be a great actor when you do it.
Not only did Nic White establish himself as a poor actor, but he also wrote his name in the rugby history books – under the title of “Clown of the decade”. Just like Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx proved years ago, he has once again proved that great clowns should have bushy moustaches.
There is something poetic in the way facial hair has stepped into the spotlight. It seems fitting that a week of hairy jokes that started with Nic White’s moustache has ended in Makazole Mapimpi delicately stroking Marika Koroibete’s pointed devil’s beard into place.
Would Mapimpi be unhappy about the trade-off of adjusting Marika’s beard for spending the last minute of the match in the naughty chair? Probably not, one might say.
Talking about the devil – it seems a little unfair that it fell to Wallaby stand-in captain, Allan Alaalatoa to stare into the eyes of the devil from three inches away. The poor man must have seen his life flash before him as Eben Etzebeth told him in a less than amiable way, what was about to happen to him. Fortunately (and it really is a testament to Etzebeth’s maturity) there was a lot of shirt-tugging and nothing else.
Of the flood of memes that hit the internet within minutes of the final whistle, the picture of the enraged Etzebeth with the caption, “What do you mean we’re out of brandewyn?!” must be the best.
It would be a journalistic error to avoid correcting a malicious rumour.
It is not true that Faf de Klerk said he believed Nic White’s moustache was a strip of Velcro.
He never said, “Nic White was wearing a strip of Velcro on his face and I wanted to pull it off.” That is not the truth.
Evidence suggests that he said, “That strip of hair under his nose – I wanted to hear it go ‘rrrt!’ as I pulled it off his face like a strip of Velcro.” An important distinction.
So here you go, Nic White: from everyone at Scrolla.Africa we thank you most sincerely for your contribution to galvanising the Springboks into a famous Springbok victory, and uniting South Africa as a nation of rugby lovers.
Image source: @TheSouthAfrican
