This past week I read an interesting comment by former Wales and British and Irish Lions captain Sam Warburton in relation to the 2019 World Cup winners and the captains of the teams.
Warburton, controversially if you are Welsh, said he favoured New Zealand to win the World Cup again and that Kieran Read would be the captain holding the trophy. He said it just seemed right to see the All Black with the trophy.
Warburton explained that as
a player he looked at captains of teams and thought some fitted the look of a World Cup winner and others didn’t.
Jake White, in 2007, said a similar thing to me when defending his selection of John Smit as his starting hooker and as his captain.
White said that when you looked back on history at those captains who had lifted the trophy, nothing seemed out of kilter: David Kirk in 1987, Nick Farr Jones in 1991, Francois Pienaar in 1995, John Eales in 1999 and Martin Johnson in
2003. He felt it would only be appropriate to add Smit’s name to that illustrious list.
Smit did join the elite club of World Cup winners in a year when a tearful All Blacks captain Richie McCaw exited the tournament in the quarter-finals.
McCaw’s best days were still to come and his story from that emotional press conference in Cardiff in 2007 to victorious captain and World Cup winner in 2011 and 2015 also seemed right.
But I am not sure about the Read look as a World Cup-winning captain. When I look at all the teams with a reasonable chance of winning, then I see Springbok captain Siya Kolisi hoisting that little gold cup into the heavens.
It looks right and it will be right on so many levels that go beyond the game of rugby.
If Pienaar and Nelson Mandela’s iconic image at the 1995 World Cup final jolted the conservatives in South Africa and demanded a change in the game, then the sight of Kolisi being a World Cup winner would be even more significant in confirming the changes in South African sport and South African society.
Kolisi speaks to all South Africans but he also speaks culturally to a majority who had been denied a global platform because of segregation and apartheid. His presence on the podium would be symbolic of a shift in South African rugby from which there could never be a U-turn.
Kolisi embodies all that is powerful and inspirational in a leader and his presence also gives black rugby its rightful place in South African rugby.
Kolisi hails from the home
of black rugby in the Eastern
Cape and a global rugby following needs to be educated about black rugby in South Africa. It is not
a millennial thing and neither
is it something that has been discovered by a generation born in the last decade
Black rugby has a rich rugby history that dates more than a century and there isn’t a more perfect stage to remind everyone of this than seeing Kolisi stand the tallest when every minute of the tournament has been played.
To borrow from Warburton, because it just looks right.
Keohane is a Cape Town-based award-winning sports journalist and a regular contributor to Independent Media.