Andy Colquhoun in Dublin Rugby
Imagine being lightly beaten about the body with baseball bats while running a 10km race – a race that you have to win – and you may have some idea of the mental and physical threshing machine through which the Springboks seem to have been passing every Saturday since the dawn of time.
Actually, it’s not that long but it probably feels it to players such as Mark Andrews, Joost van der Westhuizen, Henry Honiball and Gary Teichmann who have to get themselves “up” yet again for the challenge of the Irish at Lansdowne Road on Saturday.
It’s hard to know to what the players are most looking forward to: the completion of 18 successive Test victories or the end of the season.
The post-Tri-Nations spring has gone from the step to be replaced – around the hotels if not quite on the fields – by the zombie shuffle and 1E000-yard stare of the infantryman suffering post-traumatic stress disorder.
What has hastened the appearance is the fact that the Home Unions have annoyingly declined to play the crash test dummy role in a rollicking smash- and-grab raid of Britain and Ireland.
A try-scoring exhibition to match last year’s European tour might have been fun. A month-long slog against inferior opposition who don’t know when they are beaten is becoming a mental drag.
Saturday is Mallett’s 16th Test in charge in a year and eight of the Test team have appeared in all of them, Percy Montgomery in 15.
Saturday is Andrews’s 52nd Test out of South Africa’s last 54 (he missed World Cup games against Romania and Canada); Van der Westhuizen has played in 49 of the last 59 and Teichmann has played all of the last 37.
Physically they are probably in as good a shape as that in which they started the season apart from those – and there are a few – who are carrying niggling injuries. It’s the mental aspect that’s acting as the anchor.
“We are tired but that’s part of the game,” shrugs Teichmann. “This tour is a big one for us so there’s no excuses for not being motivated.”
Well, actually, there probably is. As carefully as the Boks may have talked up the opposition over the last three weeks it’s hard for the subconscious not be screaming “where’s Vidiri, Lomu, Cullen, Eales, Roff and Tune?” when you pick up an opposition team-sheet that reads Murray, Tait, Lee, Bulloch, Pountney and Weir. Those are, in case you were wondering, Scottish international players.
They say familiarity breeds contempt and there is probably also a sense in which victory has lost its raw thrill to a side which has won 16 successive matches. It has become a right rather than a pleasure, its garnering no more testing than choosing a can of beans at Pick ‘n Pay.
Only the most outstanding challenges may be able to fully motivate this team at this time of year. England will provide that in a week’s time while the sheer in-your-face pugnacity, if not the pugilism, of the Irish may get the creative juices flowing this week.
Mallett names an unchanged starting 15 and his counterpart Warren Gatland has also restricted his tinkering.
The reliable constant in Irish rugby at the moment is that their pack have no understanding of the concept “to take step a back”. Like the mythic Irishman in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, the only thing that seems capable of stopping them marching forward is a bullet in the face.
The eight Gatland will launch at the Springboks all appeared at Loftus Versveld in June’s midwinter madness.
Hooker Keith Wood has settled his dispute with the Irish union – and I won’t make any cheap gags about whether or not he actually has any intellectual property rights for them to purloin – and all the usual suspects will be thundering into battle with him.
Just how legal the battle will be is a subject of endless speculation here in Ireland.
Van der Westhuizen – who was yellow carded for a fairly petulant stamp on the chest of Irish lock Malcolm O’Kelly – is blamed for the Lotus Inferno quite as squarely as the man who shot Archduke Ferdinand is blamed for starting World War I.
Irish indiscretions on the day are seen largely as the righteous response of the unjustly wronged.
Of course the more hype there is the more there is the suspicion that the game will actually turn out- in that department at least – to be a damp squib. Lord be praised.
Ireland’s rugby tactics are expected to be of the alehouse variety.
Combined Provinces showed the way on Tuesday night when they reprised Ireland’s tour game plan by sending up Garryowen after Garryowen in the hope that the ball would bounce their way from time to time.
With Eric Elwood at flyhalf and set of forwards who hunt like a ravening pack of fox hounds once the ball is set in front of them it is probably the best – if least sophisticated – way to go.
And then if you look at the Irish backline the last thing Gatland will probably say to Elwood before he leaves the change room will be: “For God’s sake, don’t pass to the inside centre.”
Not that that is meant to be any particular aspersion on Jonathan Bell. It’s just that Ireland’s backs have all the piercing threat of rotten fruit thrown at a brick wall.
If it’s wet and windy and the Irish tackling is even more hungry than usual then there is the possibility that the game may devolve into a penalty shoot- out in which case Irish hopes of an upset may be sustained for 80 minutes.
But the Boks outgun the Irish and if they can stave off their mental fatigue they should equal New Zealand’s record of 17 successive Test victories and, as happily for the players, have the 1998 finishing line in sight.