There are throwbacks, and then there is naming a 44-year-old, two-time World Cup-winning All Black on your bench to play AGAINST the All Blacks. Ma’a Nonu — a man who was smashing centres into next week when half this Sharks squad were still learning cursive — has been listed among the Durban replacements, and the space-time continuum has quietly filed a complaint.
Think about the logistics of this for one second at 3am, which is the only correct time to think about it. A bloke spends a legendary career being the thing you fear in black, wins two World Cups in it, and now pulls on a Sharks tracksuit to stand on the touchline glaring at the current model of the exact team he used to BE. If he comes on, he will be tackling teammates of the ghost of himself. That’s not a substitution, that’s a philosophy exam.
For the Sharks it’s a masterstroke of theatre and nous — you want your young guns (hi Vusi) to face New Zealand without their knees knocking, so you park an ageless, ice-veined double world champion next to them and let some of that calm leak sideways. Experience isn’t a stat on this bench, it’s a temperature. Nonu lowers the room’s heart rate just by lacing his boots.
And there’s something gorgeously South African about the whole picture: the greatest tourists in the sport rock up to the Republic for the first time in three decades, and one of their own immortals is waiting for them in the OTHER changeroom, ready to give them a warm, extremely firm hug for old times’ sake. Rugby is a small, beautiful, slightly unhinged family, and Tuesday night it’s having a reunion where somebody’s definitely getting tackled at the dinner table.
Whether he plays two minutes or twenty, the Kings Park crowd will lose what little mind it has left the moment his number goes up. Forty-four years old, still answering the call, still willing to run at the fastest team on earth. Some men retire. Ma’a Nonu apparently just changes which colour he terrifies people in.