Ex-All Blacks boss claims ‘bookies arranged’ World Cup 1995 ‘poisoning’ to ensure Springboks win
Ex-All Blacks coach Laurie Mains and an inset of legend Jonah Lomu
Former All Blacks head coach Laurie Mains stands firm in his belief that the New Zealand players were poisoned before the 1995 Rugby World Cup final against the Springboks.
It’s an accusation that Mains levelled several years ago, where the former head coach revealed that he hired a private detective to look into the events leading up to the historic finale.
It was the first time that the Springboks participated in the global event, with the tournament hosted in South Africa, which had just abolished apartheid and had their first free election.
Remarkably, South Africa managed to upset the odds and reach the final, where they met their fiercest rivals, the All Blacks, at Ellis Park in the showpiece event.
A gripping match ensued with the scores levelled at nine points apiece, forcing the game into extra time with fly-halves Joel Stransky and Andrew Mehrtens adding a penalty each in extra time before the former slotted a match-winning drop goal to seal South Africa’s first World Cup title in their first attempt.
“The worst moment in my coaching career”
Mains, who stepped down as All Blacks boss after the tournament, still believes that foul play was involved and that his team were harshly denied a try-scoring opportunity, which would not have been the case in today’s game.
Despite the final taking place 30 years ago, the 79-year-old says that it’s never far from his mind.
“I’ve never stopped thinking about it,” he said on Dom Harvey’s podcast. “And it’s not that we lost. It was a great game. It’s not even how we lost.
“I’ll still maintain that Jonah [Lomu] would have scored a try when he got pulled back for a forward pass. It wasn’t a forward pass. It was close enough to that 22 metre line; when you study it on TV, it certainly wouldn’t have been called back today.
“Having said that, we went through that World Cup with some incredible stats and incredible performances. I mean, look what we did to England and Scotland. We won the Grand Slam there easily. We played Ireland first, then Wales, then Scotland, then England, and that was a real clean-up, particularly England.”
He continued, detailing the events of the Thursday evening before the final, where he believes his players were poisoned.
“We were all set to go for that final, and as was tradition, we’d leave the team to their devices on a Thursday, and the management would go out to a restaurant somewhere for dinner. Well, we did that, and when we came back into the hotel, standing at reception was Zinzan Brooke, and from the minute I saw him, I turned to Colin and said, ‘There are problems.’
“And he said, ‘Oh, half the team are up in the doc’s room vomiting and they’re sick as hell.’
“We normally went and had a little bit of a captain’s run on a Friday, We went out there, and I said to the boys, ‘Look, we’re not going to run, we’ll walk around the park and talk about what our options are from the various positions’ because we’re playing South Africa, we’d have specific tactics for them. After about a quarter of an hour, I just gave up because the players couldn’t concentrate, and I knew we were in real trouble.
“I said to Brian Lochore, who was our campaign manager there, I said, ‘Would we have any show getting this delayed till Sunday?’ He said, ‘No, too much disruption to everything. I think we’ll just try and keep it quiet.’
“The worst moment in my coaching career was seeing that team go out and play, knowing that they probably couldn’t give better than 85% because of what they’d been through.
“Now, there were three naughty boys. Eric Rush, Josh Kronfeld, and I think Fitzy [Sean Fitzpatrick], who had media commitments or something before dinner, that didn’t have the tea and coffee. They went out and ate, I think they had McDonald’s or something like that on the Thursday night, so they weren’t sick. By the time Fitzy came back, they had put out a fresh batch of tea and coffee. I’m convinced it was that first batch of tea and coffee that had been poisoned.”
Where are they now? The Springboks team 30 years after their 1995 Rugby World Cup triumph
The Suzie mix-up and hiring a private detective
A mysterious waitress has been blamed for poisoning the All Blacks, and Mains believes that she was hired to do so by bookies in the United Kingdom who wanted South Africa to win instead of New Zealand.
Any doubt about potential poisoning diminished from the former coach’s mind after a conversation he had with former New Zealand businessman and philanthropist Eion Edgar.
“There was no doubt that we were poisoned,” he said.
“This story confirmed it for me. I was having dinner with Eion Edgar, who was a great rugby follower and supported me all the way through my rugby coaching career, and had just come back from the UK after the World Cup. As soon as I walked in, he came up to me and he said, ‘I got something that is informative for you. The word in financial circles in London is that the bookies arrange for your food poisoning.’
“Now, the New Zealand Rugby Union weren’t prepared to do anything about it. Richie Guy was chairman, and I understood the reasons. So my wife was South African, so we hired a private detective over there ourselves and asked him to go and find out what had happened.
“The end result of that was that a waitress who was employed on the Wednesday and after Thursday, she just disappeared completely from the hotel where she had a permanent job.
“The private detective and the other staff were pretty convinced that if something was done, she had probably done it. And there are two theories on what it could be. It could have been a chemical thing, but there was an argument that it was probably biological, a wild plant in South Africa – I’ve forgotten the name of it. If it’s put in with your tea leaves and that sort of thing, it can lead to this sort of food poisoning.
“And he said she had a name like something like Sooki. Now I was silly enough to mention this to Bob Howitt when he wrote this book, and so that’s where the Suzie came from. ”
No backlash in New Zealand
While his successor, John Hart, fell into a state of depression after failing to win the 1999 Rugby World Cup with New Zealand and the backlash that accompanied that, Mains says that the public was far more sympathetic to him.
Considering the fact that the All Blacks were ill during the final at Ellis Park, Mains added that beating the Boks on that day in 1995 would have been one of the greatest sporting success stories of all time.
“I had no negative backlash whatsoever,” he said.
“I mean, when you see Craig Dowd and Jeff Wilson vomiting on the side of the field, it’s only someone like Keith Quinn [New Zealand broadcaster] that would say the story was made up – that I found unbelievable that he said that publicly.
“I think people were incredibly sympathetic, and they believed that we were the best team at the World Cup anyway. I mean, Andrew Mehrtens had a fantastic tournament. He missed a drop goal just before the end of full-time. He missed by about two feet, and then their first-five-eight [Stransky], he gets one and in extra time. So it’s just the way it is.
“If we had won that game, I would have said that’s one of the greatest sporting achievements of all time, given the circumstances that faced those All Blacks.”
READ MORE: Quiz: Can you name the 1995 Rugby World Cup-winning Springboks?