The grand old lady of international rugby venues is closing down for refurbishment and the Springboks have been invited to the going away party. For those used to the matchless amenities of modern sports stadia, Lansdowne Road is a bit of a joke, but for those who relish the atmosphere that stands — as opposed to seats — confer, there’s nowhere else quite like it.
As is the case at Newlands, a railway line runs alongside the ground. In the bad old days press conferences held in the concrete bunker beneath the railway stand were frequently interrupted by cries of, ‘What?†as rolling stock went rumbling past at the precise moment the Irish captain was encapsulating exactly why his team had decided, once again, to eschew finesse and pursue kick and chase tactics.
The good news is that, like Cardiff Arms Park before it, Lansdowne Road is not actually going anywhere. Plans to relocate the seat of Irish rugby to some soulless out-of-Dublin shopping precinct have been abandoned and the ground is merely being ‘improvedâ€, rather than moved.
So the Springboks will actually be saying au revoir rather than goodbye to Lansdowne Road, a ground they first graced 92 years ago on Saturday November 30 1912. It was actually the second Test between the sides, but in 1906 Paul Roos’s team, the first to adopt the name ‘Springboksâ€, played at the Ravenhill ground across the border in Belfast.
Jake White’s team may have underperformed against Wales in their opening fixture last week, but if it spurs them on to take Ireland apart in the manner of Billy Millar’s team in 1912 then all will be forgiven. The Boks also played Scotland and Wales, but not England, on that trip and did not concede a single point in the three Tests.
They saved their best for Lansdowne Road, winning by a record margin of 38-0, a remarkable achievement with a leather behemoth more akin to a medicine ball than the sweetly aerodynamic modern rugby ball.
Jan Stegmann and Boetie McHardy both scored a hat trick of tries, Jackie Morkel got two and the Boks scored 10 in all.
If such domination seems unlikely, it is worth remembering that only six years ago South Africa beat Ireland 33-0 in Pretoria. Percy Montgomery is the only Bok survivor of that massacre, but Malcolm O’Kelly, Denis Hickie and Kevin Maggs all played for Ireland that day and will bear the emotional scars to prove it.
Of course, in the greater scheme of things it was just another Irish defeat: they have only beaten South Africa once in 17 games, 9-6 at Lansdowne Road in 1965, together with an 8-8 draw against Dawie de Villiers’s unhappy tourists of 1969/70.
Even the draw had a touch of luck to it, with Irish fullback Tom Kiernan kicking a penalty in the 10th minute of injury time.
White must have sympathy for De Villiers’s team, having seen his own side unravel spectacularly during the eight minutes of injury time in Cardiff last week. The moral of that particular story is twofold: first, carry a stopwatch and, second, don’t throw on replacements for what you think are the last two minutes and expect them to become seasoned internationals from the experience.
If that is the harshest lesson to be learnt from the Wales Test, however, then things in the Bok camp are pretty rosy. They played impressive rugby for about 30 of the 88 minutes, scored enough points to make the game safe long before the end and managed to raise the morale of their opponents by conspiring to make the score line far closer than it had any right to be.
White said that although television awarded the man of the match to Victor Matfield, his own choice would have been Fourie du Preez. Wise words indeed, for the Blue Bulls’s scrumhalf controlled the match from the base of the scrum in remarkable fashion for one so wet behind the ears.
Much had been said pre-match about flyhalf Jaco van der Westhuyzen’s dodgy kicking game, but Du Preez simply removed that potential weakness from the equation. He only ever passed to Van der Westhuyzen when he knew that the flyhalf had time and space to move: on all other occasions he used his own boot to devastating effect.
Accordingly, there has been rather too much talk this week of the injury to Van der Westhuyzen (a badly gashed hand) and not nearly enough of the fitness of Du Preez. This boy has the talent to become the best South African scrumhalf since re-admission and, before you take up arms, remember that Joost van der Westhuizen was a great rugby player, but a terrible scrumhalf.
So actually it doesn’t particularly matter if the flyhalf for Saturday’s Test against Ireland is Van der Westhuizen, Jean de Villiers, Gaffie du Toit, Brent Russell or, for that matter, Naas Botha: Du Preez will give anyone who plays there an armchair ride. If he should not last the match then it’s a different story, but let’s cross that bridge if we come to it.
From Ireland we can expect the usual mixture of blood, boot and bollock with a dash of magic dust from Brian O’Driscoll, none of which will stop the Boks from completing phase two of the Grand Slam.
And if they need any more encouragement from history, then White should remind them that he was assistant coach the last time they closed a stadium, at Parc des Princes in 1997. Against a French team packed with legends they won 52-10. The crowd booed their own side and cheered the Boks, which is just the sort of unlikely occurrence that Lansdowne Road has always been famous for.