By now Springbok coach Jake White will have realised that the best dictators need to know how to compromise. Just one week away from the first Test of the season and three weeks into an exhaustive training camp, White’s side to play Ireland in Bloemfontein next Saturday bears only a passing resemblance to the one pencilled in a month previously.

If selecting a team is all about chemistry then successive Springbok coaches have discovered to their cost that certain volatile components when put together display a fine tendency to explode. So it should come as no surprise that Jake White’s Bloemfontein training camp has hardly been an unqualified success.

Just when it looked like the dust had settled on the selection of the first Springbok team of the season, Sharks scrumhalf Craig Davidson decided to have a dip at the coach. Davidson’s name was not among the 22 announced on Sunday so he went running to the papers and accused Bok coach Jake White of playing favourites.

It was Paul Simon who advised Mrs Robinson, ”Anyway you look at this you lose” – and that is certainly the case for the Stormers. Just look how it stacks up. They’re playing the Crusaders in Christchurch, the single most successful side in the history of the competition, who have been to the final five times in eight seasons.

While everyone else is busy working out their Super 12 scenarios ahead of the most frantic finish to log play in the competition’s history, the South African Rugby Football Union is one step ahead. On Wednesday this week three entirely different scenarios were sent to the press concerning the announcement of Jake White’s first Springbok squad.

If you’d predicted before the season began that in week nine of the Super 12 the Bulls and Stormers would win in Brisbane and Auckland, while the Cats and Sharks would lose in Johannesburg and Durban, you would have been asked to fill in funny farm forms there and then. But maybe Elvis really does work in a roadhouse in Benoni.

We are in uncharted waters. By week nine of the Super 12 we are usually resigned to the notion of an Antipodean super-race contesting the final stages of the competition, with just one South African franchise holding on grimly to a mid-table position. But this year three of our four sides have genuine chances of a semifinal spot and we are being force-fed optimism in place of the usual bile.

Past the halfway mark in the series and Springbok coach Jake White will be hoping fervently that the old saw about cream rising to the top holds true in the Super 12. If so it means that the three South African sides occupying positions three to five on the log are the real deal and not some kind of optical illusion.

This weekend the Bulls and Stormers squads will emulate their fans. They will have their feet up while watching, on large format television screens no doubt, the efforts of their Super 12 rivals. The idea that South African sides get a raw deal having to go on tour for a month has been done to death.

Jake White must wonder what all the fuss is about. Six weeks into his tenure as Springbok coach everything in the garden is lovely. There are three South African teams in the top six of the Super 12 and a host of players are delivering the goods in truckloads week after week.