Mike Greenaway: Country giants are Bok diamonds

A long, long time ago Danie Craven, the doyen of Springbok rugby, said that the true strength of South African rugby was to be found in the "platteland," or country district areas.

Rough and tough farmers were the iron men of the game, the good doctor said.

This is why so many rugby folk lament the increasing non-existence of rugby as soon as you get beyond the city limits.

Rudolf Straeuli, though, has long argued that the giants that Craven spoke about are still there, you just have to look a little harder.

And the Springbok coach has uncovered a good few of them for his World Cup campaign. Most of them are unheralded front-rankers and they are turning into the Boks' trump card.

Springbok captain Corne Krige smilingly describes Chris Bezuidenhout and fellow props Faan Rautenbach and Richard Bands as "rough diamonds that are being polished into highly-valuable commodities."

Not too long ago, Bands was playing for a rural town's first XV. After just one first-class match, in 1994, he gave up rugby and went cattle farming.

He thought he would give rugby one last chance and turned up in Bloemfontein and asked to play hooker. He had no success and went the next year to Pretoria, where the Bulls coach recognised a good thing and turned him into a tighthead prop.

Bezuidenhout, who is fast becoming the most-feared prop at the World Cup, has a similar story.

He played for the SA Technikon team in 1994 but he, too, went farming and did not play first-class rugby again until 2001. In-between he played a bit of rugby at No 8 for Thabazimbi, the tiniest of towns in the middle of nowhere.

He made his test debut at the age of 33.

Rautenbach is a prop from the very best breeding grounds - the farms of the Free State. He has barely played for two years because of injury, but is making a big impact at this tournament.

The three props mentioned are all naturally tough men, not gym-manufactured, supplement-enhanced muscle men.

Since this trio have begun working in tandem at the World Cup, with the 116kg John Smit at hooker, the Springbok pack has regained its reputation as a fearsome machine.

Added to the mix is another brute of a man from a one-horse town, Danie Rossouw, a flank who is two metres tall and weighs 120kg.

The Bok pack has a heavy weight advantage over the All Blacks and plan to make it count, so that pressure can be transferred on to the dangerous All Black backline.

The Boks cannot match the opposition for firepower in this department.

Let us not forget the youngest player in the game. The 20-year-old Derick Hougaard will play in the most important position on the field, first five-eighth, and a South African success may well depend on the youngster's having a fairytale game.

And a fairytale it will be for South Africans if they can once more upset the All Blacks in a World Cup tournament.

If you look at the match-up, one team is going into the game with a wonderful foundation of success, the other hope to play to a level that they have not yet reached in test rugby despite signs of potential.

After all, South Africa have lost six consecutive matches to New Zealand. The Boks have finished bottom of the Tri-Nations tournament for five years in a row.

This is the fourth time in five World Cups that the All Blacks have led the way in tries and points in the preliminary rounds.

They are just too good to be true. And this is why they are so ripe for the picking.

They have dominated the Springboks for a decade, yet in World Cup matches the Boks lead 2-0.

The point is that the World Cup is not the Tri-Nations, it is an event on a scale so much vaster that the attendant pressure is so excruciating that anything can happen on the day.

And the weight of expectation on the All Blacks is double that on any other team. South Africans believe that the All Blacks are the lifeblood of New Zealand. Without their rugby team, there is not a heck of a lot going on in New Zealand ... The fall-out from the failure at the last two World Cups refers.

Which brings us to the present. Once again the New Zealanders are on the edge of the black hole that the tournament has become to them.

The fear of failure is possibly their biggest weakness. It may well inhibit their natural exuberance.

Straeuli's Boks, on the other hand, have been battered from pillar to post for the past 18 months, drowning in the sea of negativity that has persisted since Harry Viljoen's ignominious resignation.

Record defeats, racial controversies ... you name it, the Springboks and their fans have had to endure it.

The Boks themselves have nothing to lose tonight, but their coach cannot say the same.

Straeuli is contracted until the end of 2005, and this week he stated that he intends seeing out his contract. He pleaded, too, that he and his youthful team be given the opportunity to continue building towards "the great team we can become," no matter the result of tonight's match.

And would-be Springbok supporters in the increasingly disenchanted black community have noted with distress that in 1995 the Boks fielded one black player (Chester Williams), in 1999 there was never more than one black in the team (either Deon Kayser or Breyton Paulse) and today Ashwin Willemse is the sole black representative.

There is a lobby that says that this is a record, in bold black and white, if you will, of the resistance of white Afrikaners to black advancement in the sport.

The daggers are already out for Straeuli and should the Boks lose, the blades will not remain unbloodied for long.

* Mike Greenaway is chief rugby writer for the Natal Mercury.


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