The road to the World Cup starts here. After a month of messing around with extended squads, the Springbok coaching team is sending something close to its best team into battle with Australia in Durban this weekend.
It includes many World Cup winners from the class of 2007 and represents the loading of eggs into a basket of hope. It can truly be said that if this team loses badly we have a full-scale crisis on our hands.
JP Pietersen is one of many who will be playing their first games in well over a month. The Sharks wing, whose try-saving tackle against Fiji in 2007 kept the campaign on track, is one who chooses not to hide behind the excuse that the elite Boks might lose because they are rusty.
He said: “I don’t think we need to prove anything anymore. Most of us have been Springboks for at least five years now and we should be able to turn it on and off. There is no excuse for complacency and it’s not an excuse to say that we haven’t had enough game time.”
It’s remarkable to think that Pietersen has only just turned 25. He has achieved so much in his short career and has been around long enough to have gone in and out of form. This time last year he seemed a shadow of the electrifying presence he was aged 21, but after a slow start he came good in the Super 15 for the Sharks this season.
Pietersen’s coach at the Sharks, John Plumtree, enthused about his form in April, with the caveat that he was now producing the kind of performances on a weekly basis that we are entitled to expect from a player of his pedigree. There is reason to believe, in fact, that Pietersen’s best days may yet lie ahead of him.
At the other end of the spectrum is the enigma called Butch James. Signed from Bath by the Lions in time for the final few rounds of the Super 15 this year, James ended the season prematurely by being yellow-carded for a high tackle. It seemed at that moment that James had learned nothing from a decade at the top of the game.
But it is James, perhaps more than anyone else, who has had the most faith invested in him by the coaching staff in the run-up to the World Cup. It is James, too, who has the most to gain or lose in this week’s game against Australia and, fitness permitting, next week’s against New Zealand. And, at 32, it seems that he has learned a little humility.
Speaking about his recall to the green and gold, he said: “It gets more special the older you get: as a youngster you tend to take it for granted. There are times during training when my knees give me serious trouble, but I’m prepared to bite the bullet Monday to Friday in order to enjoy the special feeling of playing with the team on Saturday.”
James has seen it all as a Springbok. He was part of the side humiliated 53-3 by England at Twickenham in 2002, a result that put his Test career on hold for four years.
He came back into Jake White’s squad in 2006 and was part of the side that beat England 36-0 in Paris in the group phase of the last World Cup. Naturally, he was also at flyhalf when the Boks beat the same side in the final a month later.
But when you look at James’ career in total, the question needs to be asked: Is he the real deal or just a good provincial player who happened to come spectacularly right for two months in France when it mattered most?
The same question is now being asked of Morné Steyn, whose prodigious form of 2009 is still being used as a justification for his inclusion in the match two years and much mediocrity later.
This week both men should get a run outside Fourie du Preez, the man whose opposite number Will Genia rates as the best in the business. After almost a year out with injury, Du Preez took a long time to regain his form with the Bulls this season. It was yet another reminder that, great though many of the Bok team that will start against the Wallabies in Durban unquestionably are, they are men and not supermen.
And so there will be a few thumping hearts, both in the coach’s box and on the field, come Saturday. South African audiences can relish once more the best centre partnership in the nation’s history, but it is asking an awful lot of Jean de Villiers and Jacque Fourie to display their A games after five weeks off.
The best lock partnership in the nation’s history will also be on display, but can Victor Matfield and Bakkies Botha possibly play as well as the legend they have created? In the greater scheme of things it would be wise to hope for the best and expect the worst.
If the Boks compete well and lose there is still hope: anything less than that and we could be in for a grim few months.