Mind games

Mind games. They’ve been a part of rugby since the year dot. It might be Fred Allen telling the All Blacks in 1968 in Australia that the Wallabies forwards had been kicking the crap out of a bag of straw at training. ‘‘And you know what they were calling it?’’ he said, glaring at Colin ‘‘Pinetree’’ Meads, ‘‘They were calling it ‘Piney’.’’ There’s actually no truth to the story, but decades later Allen would still chortle over the electrifying effect it had on Meads and the team.

It might be Sean Fitzpatrick waking on the morning of the 1995 World Cup final in Johannesburg, looking out his window at the Crowne Plaza hotel, and seeing a massive, new sign saying ‘‘Go The Boks’’.

There’s been a great twist to the mental battle this week between coaches Steve Hansen and Heyneke Meyer in the fact they’re actually mates. Hopefully Hansen will never read this but he obviously has a truly sensitive side, proven by the fact he went to the effort to go to Meyer after the first test in which they opposed each, and consoled him on the Boks’ loss in the way all Kiwi blokes would understand, by shouting him a beer.

It’s one of the oddities of the game in recent years that the relationship between the All Blacks and the Boks is patently warmer than that between New Zealand and Australia.

Nobody in the All Blacks camp shouts it from the rooftops but the invitation they offer to every team they play against, to join them for a drink and a chat in the changing shed after a test, has always been embraced by the South Africans, but shunned by the Wallabies.

What makes Sunday’s semifinal feel less nerve-wracking than the mystery box playing the French often proves to be, is that the South Africans are such frequent, and familiar, opponents. That’s the reason predicting an All Black win feels not so much jingoistic as logical.

In the days before professional rugby (which almost coincide, thankfully, with the demise of the abhorrent apartheid years), South African rugby was the scary monster behind the rugby door.

As a primary school kid in 1956 I remember my parents lapping up a patently ludicrous story that a Springbok prop called Jaap Bekker was so strong he used to snap goalposts when he packed against them in training.

Today our All Blacks are as familiar with most of the Boks as they are with players from the Chiefs, the Canes, or the Crusaders. They know there are some wonderful footballers in the Springboks, and they probably don’t even need Hansen or Ian Foster to remind them of that. But they’ll play the semifinal without any false images clouding their minds. And the strong impression is that this All Black squad is simply more talented than the South Africans.

Then, on Monday morning, we’ll find out whether the Pumas left their cup peak performance in Cardiff against Ireland. The more you consider this game the more you wonder if the mind-set of both teams will make all the difference.

Losing to the Pumas in a semifinal will feel like a failure to the Wallabies. Just making the semis probably feels like a victory to the Pumas. By and large a team that’s itchy and scratchy will always beat a team that’s content.

Although trying to judge Latin temperament is always fraught, my pick is that we’ll be seeing a trans-Tasman final next weekend.