All Black Sonny Bill Williams trains ahead of this Saturday's Springboks test. Photo / Photosport
All Black Sonny Bill Williams trains ahead of this Saturday's Springboks test. Photo / Photosport
COMMENT:
As much as it would seem that Sonny Bill Williams has been given the opportunity to control his World Cup fate, he really hasn't.
He's battling something which he's powerless to prevent and yet must confront if he is to be on the plane to Japan in September.
Theonly obstacle between him and a place at a third World Cup is injury. One more breakdown and you suspect that will be it: if his dicky knee caves in once more, or a volatile shoulder throws up a white flag, the risk of taking him to Japan will be deemed too great.
And so Williams, a veteran of two previous World Cups, now finds himself in the curious position of being tasked to prove his durability to win a place at a third.
Many of his younger, less experienced teammates are having to prove they have the skill, the courage and the resilience to cut it in test football and earn their ticket to Japan.
Williams has done all that and hence the bar has been set lower and his mission against the Boks this Saturday is to come through the test in one piece.
He doesn't need to throw miracle off-loads, or damage the South African defence with his muscularity. He just needs to get through the game without any part of him breaking.
An injured Sonny Bill Williams. Photo / Photosport
That's it, and while that seems imminently achievable, Williams would disagree. His body, forever maintained and in immaculate condition, scores high on aesthetics but disturbingly low on durability.
The last four years have seen him play just 37 games and rarely in the last two has he managed to play consecutive weekends.
It has reached the stage where a Williams-injury update is an almost obligatory part of the post-match theatre.
Who would know why. Perhaps it's the highly-tuned precision of it all – one bump seems to knock the calibration all too easily.
It could be his age combined with the mileage: he was a regular with the Bulldogs when he was 19, in a league that must rank among the least forgiving in professional sport. Who wouldn't be showing some wear and tear after 14 seasons of high-impact football?
Or perhaps it's just bad luck – a case of him having a genetic make-up that doesn't support his natural propensity to try to dominate collisions.
All he knows is that he's had enough of taking a titanium mind-set into collisions with a body seemingly made of glass.
No one wants to be the guy who keeps getting injured. Not just because of the frustration, or the possibility of it becoming defining in some way, but because there is no way of controlling it or changing it.
It's not like Williams can not tackle or not hurl himself at the line when he carries the ball. He can't avoid doing the things that have injured him so frequently in the past so on Saturday he simply has to cross his fingers and hope that he comes through each collision unscathed.
"We have got to see him stay on the park," said All Blacks coach Steve Hansen in relation to what Williams must do to press his World Cup claim. "If he comes off it is because he has run out of energy as opposed to injury. We know he can play rugby to a high level so it is his durability at the moment that has been affecting him about getting on the park so we just want to see him put some minutes together and assess it from there."
To be armed only with hope might not provide much solace for Williams, so perhaps, should he need evidence that persistent frailty can be cured, he can look back to the last World Cup and the journey taken there by Daniel Carter.
The great first-five was on-off throughout 2012 and 2013 as bones broke and muscles pulled. He missed almost all of 2014 after he fractured his leg when he returned from a six-month sabbatical.
Super Rugby didn't go that well for him injury-wise in 2015 and coming into the tournament he had no form, no confidence and no real momentum behind him after being so ravaged by injury.
But somehow, come the tournament, it all clicked. His body held up. The injuries stopped and randomly, this almost broken beyond repair athlete wound back the clock and delivered consecutive world class performances.
Williams needs a similar transition: a window of luck to open for him the way it did for Carter and for every molecule to finish the test in precisely the order in which it began.
