Two captains, thirty years, and one arm around a shoulder

Sean Fitzpatrick did not know what to do with the flag.

He was 63 years old, standing on the Ellis Park grass with the New Zealand flag in his hands and no real idea where he was meant to put himself. The anthems were about to start. Sixty-two thousand people were waiting. And the former All Blacks captain was, by his own account, stuck.

Then Ardie Savea put an arm around him and pulled him into the line.

Thirty years earlier another man had stood on that same field in the same job, carrying the other flag. On Saturday, nobody came for him.

The grip

Fitzpatrick said the morning after the match that he gripped Savea back so hard he was pinching the skin around the captain’s midriff. He had gone from ornamental to included in about two seconds, and he was not letting go.

It is a small thing. A current captain noticing a former one drifting at the edge of a team photograph and deciding that was not on.

Savea did not have to do it. He was ninety seconds from leading the All Blacks into the most hostile Test venue in world rugby, against a side that had beaten everyone put in front of it for twelve matches. His attention had somewhere else to be.

He felt like “running over and doing the haka” — then decided his 63-year-old body had other views.

Sean Fitzpatrick, the morning after the first Test

Why it was Fitzpatrick holding that flag

This was not a randomly chosen old player.

Fitzpatrick captained the 1996 All Blacks — the side that became known as the Incomparables for doing the one thing no New Zealand team had ever managed. They won a Test series in South Africa. Sides in 1928, 1949, 1960, 1970 and 1976 had all gone home without it. Fitzpatrick’s team won 2-1.

He played 92 Tests and captained his country from 1992 until he retired in 1997. He rates that series above the 1987 World Cup.

Saturday was thirty years on, at the same ground, in the opening Test of a series built to mark it.

The man standing on his own

The other flag was carried by Gary Teichmann.

Teichmann captained the Springboks through that 1996 series. He was the man on the losing end of the most painful home result in South African rugby history, and he has carried it with more grace than most would manage. He and Fitzpatrick unveiled the new trophy together before this series started. Two captains, one scar, thirty years of being asked about it.

On Saturday night one of them got folded into a team. The other stood by himself while the anthem played.

Nobody did anything wrong. There was no snub, no plan, no slight — just a gesture that happened on one side of the halfway line and did not happen on the other. But if you are South African and you watched it, you noticed. Someone should have reached for Gary.

What the gesture actually says about this rivalry

Rugby between these two countries is sold as loathing. It is not, and it never really has been.

The haka on Saturday was met with silence by an Ellis Park crowd that could have drowned it out and chose not to. Then those same people spent eighty minutes trying to tear the All Blacks apart, and were furious at the end. Both things are true. That is the whole point of it.

Savea’s arm around a 63-year-old is the same instinct as sixty-two thousand South Africans going quiet for a war dance. Respect first. Then everything else.

What happens next

The second Test is at DHL Stadium in Cape Town on Saturday 29 August. This is a four-Test series, not a three, and New Zealand lead 1-0 with matches to follow at FNB Stadium on 5 September and in Baltimore on 12 September. South Africa must win all three to take it.

Teichmann will be around for those, too. Somebody has a chance to do for him what Ardie Savea did for Sean Fitzpatrick.

Should a Springboks captain have pulled Gary Teichmann into the line the way Savea pulled in Fitzpatrick?