John Roughan: Nothing beats beating the Boks on their home ground

There is indeed a corner of a foreign field that is forever ours. We could spot it overnight. It is a metre or two from the near left corner flag in the television picture, and I would like to erect a monument there to Brooke. Not the poet, the player.

It would depict Robin Brooke crouching on the blindside of a ruck with the ball coming back to the Springboks who were ready to fling themselves again at the All Black line.

Time was up. A try would win it. Joost van der Westhuizen grabbed the emerging ball and plunged for the corner. Brooke, bless him, was unbound and offside. Van der Westhuizen ran smack into his big chest.

Not many moments in rugby matches stick in my mind but that one always will. When the final whistle sounded right there in that corner, the boy in me could die happy.

It is hard to believe 10 years have passed since John Hart's team laid to rest the ghost that had eluded us so long, hard even to remember how much it rankled that until then no New Zealand team had beaten South Africa in a series on their soil.

It sounds like Graham Henry's team, having won this year's tri-nations championship, is using the example of 10 years ago for motivation in its two matches there. Henry is old enough to know how much it matters, but I wonder what remains of that heritage in the players.

My father told me the terrible tale of 1937, which even he had been too young to witness, when a touring Springbok team won a series in this country, and the yet worse story of 1949, when a team of his contemporaries went there to settle the score and failed.

By the time he told me I had already filled a scrapbook with another unsuccessful tour, in 1960.

In those days you waited 10 years for each shot. While we waited through the 1960s, the All Blacks went unbeaten.

The Springboks came here mid-decade and were dispatched with less drama than their previous visit in 1956. We have marked the 50th anniversary of that tour with more note than we have given 1996.

Back in the 60s the Lions were slaughtered, an All Black tour of Britain wrote back play out of the British coaching manual, Australians, Welsh and French came and were conquered. By 1970 we could not be more confident.

A supreme team went to South Africa with some new talent added. There was still no television in the republic. We followed their progress in photographs showing them playing on hard dust in sunlight so bright the pictures looked over-exposed.

Press reports raved about a teenage winger, B.G. Williams, who was scorching defences everywhere.

Then came the first test and my father woke me and younger brothers Paul and Mark in the early hours of the morning. We sat around the living room listening to the crackling radio.

After a while it began to sound like things were not going quite right. Chris Laidlaw had been done over in some way and seemed to be out of it but was playing on, as you did before substitutes were allowed.

We waited for the All Blacks to put the scoreboard right, which they always did. Time went by. It was not happening.

Near the end, as the commentator counted down the minutes to go, Dad looked resigned but we three were in disbelief. I remember hearing full-time called with my head in revolt. Then I heard a sniffling across the room. Mark, 11 years old, had tears steaming down his cheeks.

Dad tried to console him, said it was only a game. We shuffled back to bed trying to come to grips with the injustice of the world.

The All Blacks lost that series and another in 1976. Generally we blamed South African referees. They had the look of staff sergeants who probably enforced apartheid in their day jobs. They might not be well disposed toward multiracial opposition.

After 1976 there were no more visits to the old South Africa, unless you count the Cavaliers of 1986, who failed too.

By 1996 just about everything had changed. Apartheid had gone and so had full tours and proper test series. Hart's chance would not come again. International rugby had become fixated on a four-yearly World Cup.

South Africa had hosted and won the cup in 1995 under the eye of Nelson Mandela. But that now looks like the last gasp of the old confidence. The new South Africa has yet to find its spirit on the rugby field.

Professionalism and television sponsorship has brought an international provincial series which has destroyed some of the old mystique of South Africa for us, and no doubt of us for them.

We exchange teams of our top players several times every season now, without much success for theirs. When ours travel there hardly anybody here bothers to get up in the early hours to hear it any more.

Yet there still is nothing in rugby for me that can match an All Black clash with the Springboks.

The Wallabies may have been more complete in recent years, the French more aggressive and the English more solid, but South Africa is different - at least they are when they play us.

When Australia humiliated them at Perth last month we knew it was not a reliable measure of the test the All Blacks would face the following week.

So it proved. The Boks would have won at Wellington but for an extraordinary covering tackle by Richie McCaw, who is playing out of his skin in the captaincy.

May the rest of the team recapture some of the old challenge. Sometime in the next few hours Henry should take them, if he has not already, down to that corner of Loftus Versfeld where the demon died.

Or did it? The adrenalin always returns at the kick-off. When the forwards thump together for the first time and the backlines scramble to cover every possible point of penetration, nothing can be taken for granted again.

Two countries, equally confident, different places, same reference point of pride. There is no greater trial of strength for either of us. The silver may be already in the cabinet but nothing remains quite as satisfying as beating the Boks on their turf.