The Power Play....A team that also likes to beat the English

ThomasH

Rugby is not a gentle game. But when the South African team walked onto Newlands rugby ground in Cape Town to face the British and Irish Lions on Sept. 12, 1903, expectations were of an especially violent match. It was just over a year since the Boers, or Afrikaners, and the British had been at war, a brutal conflict in which Britain's Lord Kitchener built the world's first modern concentration camps and the Afrikaners found one of the defining moments of their history. On that September day, after two matches drawn in a three-match series, the South Africans had one thing on their minds: bloody revenge

During the Boer War, Afrikaner prisoners in British camps, like this one in the South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, take to rugby as a welcome diversion—and an outlet for aggression


The rugby pitch was the one place where they could fight the war all over again." Records of the match do not list how many British noses were broken or ankles stamped on, only that after drawing 10-10 and 0-0 in the earlier matches, the imperial masters unexpectedly went down 8-0 (two tries and one conversion) in the Newlands mud. It was the first time the British had lost a series in South Africa.

In 1902, the Boers and the British even agreed to a temporary cease-fire to allow a game between the two forces

From the 1930s, Afrikaner nationalism, originally a righteous reaction to defeat by the British, transformed itself into something altogether less sympathetic. Initially, the enemy was the English and the English language.

South Africa's first nonwhite player, Errol Tobias, played in a match against Ireland in 1981.

(Clint Eastwood has announced he will direct a film about the WC95 tournament, with Matt Damon as Pienaar and Morgan Freeman as Mandela.)

Super Sidious

MATTTTT DDDAAAAAMMMMONNNNNNNN

Pinetree Boy

Who should play Susy the waitress. Zinzan to play himself.

Crash

Damon does kinda look like Pienarr - and Morgan Freeman would always be the actor picked for Mandela :P