Tightheads & Loose Balls
● It’s been an interesting week for the Boks in sleepy Omaezaki in Shizuoka Prefecture. Coach Rassie Erasmus enjoyed the hotel because it is on a secluded golf estate. His players had no distractions as the hotel is located on a hillside about 5km from the nearest town. The Boks next checked in at a hotel on an island in Kobe. Go figure.
● Omaezaki is located in an earthquake zone. So high are the odds on a major quake striking that a nuclear power station located 5km to the southeast and visible from the Bok hotel, was decommissioned in 2011.
If that leaves you a little uneasy, spare a thought for the bulk of the SA media contingent that was booked in at a hotel right next to the power plant. Things spiced up further when a quake registering 4.1 on the Richter scale broke our sleep on Wednesday morning.
● If the week wasn’t scary enough, not so friendly neighbours North Korea resumed hostilities by firing a ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan. All this potential peril is too much for one writer covering his first Bok tour. He is easily spooked and is apparently also afraid of spiders — a fact he will regret sharing with us. He was promptly reminded of that much under-reported hairy and scary creature that visits you in your sleep — the terrorgotchi.
● The sleepy town we shared with the Boks this week looks like Sedgefield in the Southern Cape on the one side of the main drag and Lakeside in Cape Town on the other. It didn’t have much by way of restaurant options but there was a McDonalds that the Boks frequented.
It meant we often bumped into management members in the few restaurants dotted around town. On one occasion in a splendid Nepalese curry house the place only had people either linked to the Bok team or members of the SA media inside it.
● “It was a stupid act,” Italy coach Conor O’Shea said of the actions of his loosehead prop Andrea Lovotti that earned him a red card against the Boks. It was pretty stupid. Lifting a player after the whistle had gone over the horizon and landing him awkwardly is just asking for trouble.
To make matters worse for the Italians the other prop who initially went unpunished for the spear tackle on Vermuelen has been cited for his involvement in the incident.
Nicola Quaglio will attend a disciplinary hearing in Tokyo today alongside Lovotti after being cited by citing commissioner John Montgomery of Scotland.