1981: The Springbok Tour

1981: The Springbok Tour

I am a protester and I don’t think the rugby game should go ahead because, for starters, I really don’t get why the Springbok players think that they are better than all the other Maori players in the All Blacks. If they didn’t want to play the Maori people, then they shouldn’t have played at all. Why did the Springboks even have the permission to take out certain players? Just imagine if you were the best player in your whole team but you were even part Maori, and you had to sit out of the game because of it, what would you do? Can you even imagine that?

In my opinion no-one should have ever have let the Springboks into our country. You might be wondering what was so bad about this tour. The Springboks, whenever they play against a team, they took out all the coloured people in the team, all the other countries went along with this rule but the New Zealanders said “NO”, well half of us anyway. The Protesters didn’t want the game to go on while all the Rugby Supporters wanted was to watch a game. I my opinion, the Rugby supporters didn’t care about the Maori players and that is bad in its own way.

The fight was chaos. Police on one side, holding batons and there see-through shields and the protesters with their bike helmets to protect their heads and their own shields. One police said, “it was “sheer luck” that nobody even got killed that day.

I reckon that it was terrible for the Springboks to take out certain players because of their colour, after all it was not their fault they were born like that, and I think it was terrible for everybody else to go along with it. And this is why I and a protester.