THANKS, BOKS, FOR MAKING US PROUD

THE international rugby season ends at Twickenham tomorrow when a World Barbarians team featuring a handful of Springboks does battle with Samoa.

It is the last action of this most abnormal of years for our Springbok players, and when they are all comfortably at home and have their feet up for the festive season, they can happily reflect on a job well done.

The Springboks are, after all, the No 1 team in the World Rugby rankings, just as they were at the beginning of this troubled season. But they have had to fight incredibly hard to preserve their top ranking and, in fact, lost it to New Zealand for a few weeks before reclaiming it.

A number of critics were convinced that the Boks would flounder in 2021 because they had played no rugby in 2020 due to South Africa's severe lockdown, the worst among the major rugbyplaying nations.

Last year, all of the Boks' adversaries played Test matches, but the Boks did not lace up a boot in anger until July of this year, about 20 months after they had last played a match, which happened to be their World Cup final triumph in Japan.

That meant Siya Kolisi's team lost an entire season of growth. If they had played last year, as their rivals did, they would certainly have evolved and progressed in their collective playing ability. Instead, they went into a dramatic series against the British and Irish Lions from the coldest of starts and wracked with Covid-19 cases, and, after losing the first match, rallied to win the series.

Having not played for 20 months, the Boks then played 13 Tests in 20 weeks, winning eight of them and losing five, although three of those losses were to heartbreaking, last-gasp penalty goals, as was the case last week when they lost 27-26 to arch-rivals England.

Overall, it was a remarkable achievement by Kolisi's team to retain their No 1 ranking, and we thank them for making South Africa proud.