Andy Capostagno Rugby
We have reached that time of the year when people begin to talk in clichs. Stuff like: “We don’t believe that we are favourites for the match. Just because it’s a northern hemisphere team we’re expected to win comfortably, but we won’t be taking them for granted. A test match is a test match.”
That, or something very close to it, would have been the gist of Wallaby coach Rod MacQueen’s address to the Australian media in the week leading up to the mismatch of Ballymore.
Never mind that his president had called the England squad minus 13 first choice players, “the biggest sell-out since Anzac day”, MacQueen had to find a way to motivate his players to play properly against the tourists. Presumably a score of 76-0 suggests that he was successful.
It’s very difficult for anyone who wasn’t there to appreciate exactly how devastated England’s team must have been, although in the spirit of inquiry I lost 10 and eight on the golf course the following day, the largest margin by which it is possible to lose in match-play.
Nick Mallett, as a student of the game, will have been watching the match in Brisbane as an aperitif to Western Province’s 12-6 defeat of Ireland at Newlands.
At the end of the Province game he will have begun to prepare his attack on Ireland and his defence against the probing noses of the quote hungry media.
After Tuesday’s 52-13 thrashing at the hands of Griquas, Ireland have now lost three of their four games on tour.
But Ireland `s manager, the redoubtable Donal Lenihan, is old enough to remember the writing-off of Ireland’s team which toured here in 1981. A Springbok selection which included such all- time greats as Danie Gerber, Naas Botha and Rob Louw struggled to a 23-15 win in Cape Town after being level at 15-15 at half time.
A week later it took the educated boot of Naas to salvage victory in Durban. Ireland led 7-6 at half time and it needed not one, not two, but three drop goals from the buck-toothed boykie (plus a penalty) to turn the match in the Boks’s favour.
What did Ireland have then that they can hang onto for inspiration now? Well, principally they had their greatest ever back-row combination.
At eighth man was Willie Duggan, the lanky play-maker who was a dead heat with Serge Blanco as the most dedicated smoker international rugby has ever known.
Duggan would actually stub out his cigarette on his way down the tunnel, and then only because he didn’t want to be seen to smoke through the national anthems.
The flanks were John O’Driscoll and Fergus Slattery. Both great, but Slattery, a Lion under Willie John McBride in 1974, was and still is recognised as more of a god than a man. Slattery was past his prime in 1981, but the three together were more than a match for Wynand Claassen, Theuns Stofberg and Rob Louw.
So what can the class of 1998 produce? The likely back-row combination at the time of writing is Victor Costello, Andy Ward and Dion O’Cuinneagain.
They will be up against Gary Teichmann, Andr Venter and Rassie Erasmus. A mismatch? Maybe not. Costello did enough during the five nations campaign to camouflage the absence of Eric Miller. Ward is a New Zealander, with all that that entails and O’Cuinneagain is another product of Stellenbosch University whom Western Province have seen fit to disregard.
There’s one on either side. Gaffie du Toit is the prophet without honour in his own province for the Boks.
O’Cuinneagain is either too slow for the Currie Cup or too intelligent for it, depending on who you talk to. Anyone who has ever seen him marshal a sevens team will be under no illusions as to his pace and if being paid in pounds while turning out for sale in England is any indication of native wit, the chances are O’Cuinneagain fits the Mensa profile quite nicely too. If nothing else, he will at least understand the Bok lineout calls.
Will that be enough to enable Ireland to compete? Of course not, but expect Warren Gatland’s idea of a game plan to be somewhat more sophisticated than Clive Woodward’s, his coaching counterpart in the England set up.
The game, we are constantly reminded, has changed, but there is still a role for the player who believes in the importance of killing the opposition flyhalf.
So don’t expect Ireland to be as tactically nave in their estimation of Gaffie du Toit. Mallett has already gone on record as saying that Joost van der Westhuizen needs to protect his flyhalf in Bloemfontein. That means that Van der Westhuizen will have to hang onto the ball if he sees men in green shirts baring down with intent upon young Du Toit.
Whether keeping the ball will save Du Toit from the mother and father of a shake down remains to be seen, however. It will be incumbent upon several other Springboks to join the Save Gaffie Society if he is to remember his first Test for more than a few aching bones 30 years from now.
That’s where the back row come in and that’s where, upon Bloemfontein’s famously hard turf, the game will be won or lost.
The sad news is that the Free State Stadium will not be full. It only holds 37E000, the smallest of the test stadiums in this country, but when Free State cannot gather 10E000 there for a Super 12 game it is clearly not going to be heaving for the men in green (Ireland, not South Africa, will be wearing white).
The market is becoming saturated and with another Irish Test plus further encounters with Wales and the English C team to come, whether Donal Lenihan likes it or not, Ireland are playing to restore the credibility of northern hemisphere rugby.