If only the Boks ran South Africa

“A safe pair of hands”. A sportswriter’s go-to phrase while in the grip of a feverish session of post-match reporting … as the editor frets and curses and harrumphs over the lateness of the copy.

The words do a pretty good job, though, of summing up the crushing Springbok invasion of Los Pumas territory on a warm spring night in Mbombela on Saturday.

It was not so much a case of argy-bargy (sorry, Pumas) — a “noisy disagreement”, says the dictionary — than a proper drubbing in which the Boks maintained possession, keeping the blue-and-white cats penned in their own half and rolling over them in repeated bursts of meat-fuelled speed and superiority.

The team brought the Rugby Championship cup home to South Africa for the first time since 2019. It’s been five long years of scrappiness and disappointment, with the curse really only lifting when the Boks brought home the World Cup once more in 2023. 

Five bad years in which the coronavirus upended the planet and brought economic ruin in its wake. Even the Lucky Country, so good at stepping back from the abyss at the last moment, was not spared because for most of its people, the margins between work and hunger are too thin.

Back to the Lowveld, with some saying this might be one of the greatest Springbok sides ever to hit the field in the long history of the game. Prepared. Fast. Nimble. Unstoppable.

The exact opposite, then, of the various governments of national disunity, the high points of whose game-playing since May 29 have been unstately episodes of back-stabbing, jockeying, machinating and whining — words that no half-decent sportswriter would go anywhere near.

We, the people, can only dream what it would be like to have a government a fraction as ready and nimble as the Springboks.

Imagine the speed at which the work would get done, cleanly and without grumbling, and with a vigour distressingly absent in any government department.

Imagine Ox Nche as Transnet CEO. No locomotives? Then I’ll haul the trains over the mountains myself, swatting away the cable thieves and vandals as I go.

And how about Eben Etzebeth as minister of “getting the whole project over the line”? Really, if there was a government masterclass in getting stuff done, Etzebeth would be the entire manual.

Cheslin Kolbe could show SAA how to fly and Siya Kolisi, naturally, would be president. A safe pair of hands indeed.

In the early days of the second US invasion of Iraq, there was a spate of US companies recruiting combat-experienced infantry officers to their management teams.

No need for such extremes in the Lucky Country. Here it’s sport that shows off our best side and gives the rest of us a little hope, as fleeting as it might be, that everything, somehow, is going to be OK. Until then, to paraphrase a bit of Argentina’s own history, los Pumas — and the cup — son nuestros (they are ours).