The Wallabies have tasted endless defeat at Cape Town since 1992.
As if beating the Springboks and Pumas on their home turf is not onerous enough, it also involves a road trip from hell.
The Wallabies will this week discover the logistics involved in getting to South Africa, Argentina and then back home can send everyone around the twist.
Countless Wallabies can vouch for the fact it is an itinerary fraught with danger. But it is always memorable – and for many past and present Wallabies it ranks among their career highlights. You certainly never forget it.
ESPNscrum
Australian teams usually go a bit loopy a few days out before heading to Johannesburg and beyond.
For decades, Wallabies have been spooked by the travel and the altitude factor involved when playing in South Africa. It has seen Australian teams wearing sunglasses on the flight in the belief it will help overcome jetlag.
Others have tried sleeping and eating meals at odd hours to get their body clock right.
The 1963 Wallabies even tried cleaning their teeth prior to running onto the field believing that would stop the out-of-breath effect of playing at altitude. At least they had fresh out-of-breath.
One time John Connolly tried to con the media into believing that he would demand the players wear woolen beanies every second of every flight in order to help them relax. As usual Connolly was taking the mickey.
Even when the Wallabies are not playing at altitude – such as this time around as they are heading to Newlands in Cape Town – they can still be easily disorientated and dismayed.
When Greg Smith was the Wallabies coach, one of his props complained during a training session: “This altitude is really knocking me around.” One problem. The team was at the time running in the sand along the Durban beachfront.
Cape Town has other traps.
While it is easily the most alluring of the South African Test rugby venues, it has for that exact reason been a haven for constant Australian sorrow.
The city’s party atmosphere has seen Wallabies sent home due to bad nightclub behavior, some have gone missing, others have wished they did go missing, while they have endlessly been the prime target of the South African media, who delight in lampooning Australians.
While there is a level of respect between the South African and New Zealand rugby fraternities, buoyed by decades of intense competition trying to prove to each other who is the best in the world, Australia has struggled to achieve similar esteem in the Republic.
Many South Africans perceive Australian sportsmen as arrogant and unnecessary loud mouths. A lot of that has had to do with the antics of the Australian cricket team, and their often offensive sledging of opponents.
So when the Wallabies have repeatedly slipped in Cape Town – a city where they haven’t won a Test since 1992 – the local press have pounced.
One of the crazier episodes occurred in 2005 when a Cape Town newspaper discovered a completed player questionnaire had been left behind in a restaurant.
Despite being a bit of a joke, it was highly embarrassing, revealing that the Wallabies wouldn’t actually mind eating each other, if they were forced to cannibalism after a plane crash. The South Africans made the most of this and the Wallabies once again were the butt of endless Tri-Nations jokes.
Not surprisingly, the Wallabies lost several days later. The then Springboks coach Jake White inflamed it further by blaming the rugby league element in the team for the Wallabies losing their way. Then the country’s leading weekend paper, the Sunday Times, slammed the team in an editorial, describing them as “Buttheads of the Week” for breaking “new grounds of sheer stupidity”.
The editorial ended with: “Thankfully they’re all on their way home now.
Good riddance.”
So it can be very tough for Australia in this foreign land… even when they are wandering along the waterfront gazing up at Table Mountain.
Then there are the trials and tribulations of getting from Cape Town to Mendoza for the next match. Time is tight, and for an experienced team management it requires a lot of nous and plenty of contacts to ensure everyone catches the right connections.
The current Australian team management is relatively inexperienced, and should start praying that luck is on their side over the next fortnight and that they get to the north of Argentina with their sanity still intact.
This is very much a trip where it’s not what you know, but who you know – especially in higher circles.
Two years ago, the trek to Rosario turned into a nightmare.
Johannesburg international airport was in its usual Sunday afternoon chaotic state, with hundreds of passengers queuing for flights that were scheduled to leave in the next few minutes.
The only way anyone could get on these flights was to bribe someone. And yes that’s what two members of the Australian media contingent did.
We approached a very shady spiv wandering around the terminal, who escorted us to an as shady character behind one of the customer desks, who escorted us to an even more dubious flight attendant, who (after money had changed hands) escorted us to our seats.
A day later we found ourselves in Rosario, thankful that the final part of the travel schedule involved a bus trip from Buenos Aires rather than internal flights.
Flying within Argentina can be bare-knuckle stuff, especially when you’re about to take off and notice that aircraft mechanics, puffing away on cigars, are on the tarmac tapping away with their hammers at the plane’s engines.
Another time, a flight was delayed after a hatch situated along the passenger aisle suddenly opened, a head bobbed up, looked around, laughed, and then a second later the figure disappeared back under the hatch. That did nothing for passenger confidence.
Even getting out of the country can be tricky.
One Wallabies trip from Buenos Aires to London involved stopovers in Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, Rome and Paris. The only food offered on the flight was an apple … and it was flowery.
No wonder some passengers tried to start up a BBQ in the back aisles, before being told by the flight attendants that would not be a wise move.
But it is made worthwhile by the Argentinean experience. Two years ago, the locals, who celebrated the fact that Wallabies followers had made the effort to get there, embraced those few Australians who had travelled halfway around the world for the Rosario international. The players were also made to feel welcome – a great relief after a week of solitary confinement in South Africa.
They were endlessly entertained, while the media in Rosario could not have done more for the three Australian scribes at the Test.
Match day began with the ”third half” – a sumptuous feast on the banks of the Rosario River, with every meat cut known to man sizzling away on a coal barbecue. There were endless photographs and speeches before the Australian media pack was handed its present – a five-kilogram meat hamper.
Realising that would take some explaining at the Sydney customs gate, luckily we found a Wallabies tour group back in town, who gleefully devoured it as their pre-Test snack.
Onto the game.
More hugs and kisses from the locals. And more chaos. We had walked into an ”old school” ground. No clock. No electronic scoreboard. And gargantuan spiders had invaded the press box, with the match program’s best use being to squish anything that came near our laptops.
To top it all off, hours after full-time, the members of the Australian media pack, knowing about six words of Spanish between them, flagged down a dilapidated bus that went past the ground, hoping it was heading to the centre of town, not Buenos Aires or the Amazon. To our shock, it dropped us off right in front of our hotel.
So if the Wallabies can avoid all the distractions and keep their minds focused and win one, let alone two Tests while they are away, it will be an enormous achievement. As big an achievement is if the media corp following them are able to utter a coherent sentence by the time they return to Sydney.