Rugby World Cup dilemma: Cricket umpires to rule on late start to watch the rugby

Not the usual get-up for cricket, but, hey, it's Rugby World Cup final time, and Hawke's Bay cricket coach Christie van Dyk is ready. Photo / Paul Taylor

In the interests of being a good sport Christie van Dyk is happy to leave it up to the umpires – to decide whether he watches the cricket - or the rugby.

The easy answer to a dilemma arises with Hawke’s Bay cricket coach and South African national van Dyk as keen as anyone to watch the Rugby World Cup final when it starts at 8am on Sunday.

But at the same time he’ll be with his other team in Levin awaiting the second day of a match against Horowhenua Kapiti in Levin, scheduled to start at 10.30am.

“We’re asking if we can finish later on Saturday and start a bit later on Sunday,” he said, recognising that if the rugby between the All Blacks and South Africa is as close as he predicts then it could go to extra time, as it did when the Springboks first won the cup with a 15-12 extra-time kicks-only victory in Johannesburg in 1995.

“It’s not up to me to decide, it’s the umpires, but I think they will go with it,” said Christie, who retains his allegiance to the Springboks more than 20 years after migrating to New Zealand with wife and netball legend Irene van Dyk.

But at home in Hawke’s Bay, to where the family moved from Wellington in 2019, it could be different. “She supports the All Blacks,” he said.

Unsurprisingly, Christie van Dyk played rugby as he grew up, the son of a high school principal, in Vereeniging, near Johannesburg, and but for a few of life’s turns and twists could have been a starring act at a World Cup, given that he was a flyhalf (first five-eighths), and loved kicking goals .

But he confesses: “I thought I was much better than I really was. And I was too skinny and soft.”

When he did his “ACL” it was time to give up the rugby and concentrate on the studies at Potchefstroom.

Like most South Africans, he will be expecting much of modern-day Springboks flyhalf Handré Pollard, who’s scored about 700 points for South Africa, although just 21 in the 2023 tournament.

The All Blacks would be wise to not let the Springboks into their own half, van Dyk says, because he’s sure Pollard will take any goalkicking opportunity he can get.

If the umpires red-card the late Sunday start proposal, he says he’ll “just” have to watch the replay, for he and his team still have to focus on the cricket at Levin’s Donnelly Park almost as much as All Blacks coach Ian Foster will on the rugby 19,000km away at Stade de France in Paris.