Springbok legend likely to be dumped
LONDON: Coach Heyneke Meyer is set to sweep aside sentiment and leave Springbok stalwart Victor Matfield out of his match 23 for Saturday’s World Cup quarter-final match against Wales, a bold move considering Matfield’s considerable influence on the team.
The 38-year-old Matfield retired after the 2011 World Cup, but last year, Meyer asked him to make a comeback, and the 125-Test lock has had had mixed results. During the period that he has been injured at the World Cup, Lood de Jager has upstaged the veteran.
The hard-working youngster has been arguably the Boks’ best player at the World Cup and has made the most tackles at the tournament – 50.
Going by the shadow side that trained at the Boks’ base at Pennyhill Park in Surrey yesterday, Matfield, who is over a hamstring injury, won’t feature on the bench as lock cover, with that duty going to another rising star, Pieter Steph du Toit.
Another stalwart set for the sidelines is long-serving tighthead prop Jannie du Plessis, 32, who finds himself behind another emergent talent in Frans Malherbe, 24.
In another likely change to the team that beat the USA last week, JP Pietersen has recovered from a knee injury and will take over from Sharks teammate Lwazi Mvovo on the wing.
With Matfield unlikely to make the cut, the Boks have lost two captains at the World Cup. Jean de Villiers went home with a broken jaw after round two (only to return as a cheerleader) and Matfield is now out of favour, leaving Fourie du Preez to continue captaining the side.
Meyer was due to announce his team at noon today.
SCHALK Burger’s eternally beaming face briefly gave way to a deep frown yesterday when he was asked what lessons had been learned from the 2011 World Cup defeat to Australia in New Zealand that might help the Boks win Saturday’s quarter-final against Wales.
“A quantity of bottles of red wine have been drained while discussing how we conspired to lose that match,” Burger said wistfully.
“More than any other defeat, that one has haunted me and I know the other guys who played that day feel the same way. It still bugs me to this day.”
Of the squad that feature in Springbok rugby’s own “9-11” disaster (the scoreline that day in favour of the Wallabies), a number are again doing World Cup duty for their country: Burger, Victor Matfield, Fourie du Preez, Bismarck du Plessis, Patrick Lambie, Bryan Habana, JP Pietersen, Morné Steyn, Francois Louw and Willem Alberts, while Jean de Villiers is with the current squad albeit in an unofficial capacity since breaking his jaw against Samoa.
“We played all of the rugby, created nearly all the try-scoring opportunities, yet lost. If that game was played over again, nine times out of 10 we would have won it. We completely dominated Australia,” he said.
Without mentioning the refereeing, what lesson did the Boks learn that day that they can embrace this week?
“Despite dominating the opposition, we failed to build an innings on the scoreboard,” Burger said. “You have to do that in knockout rugby. We succumbed to scoreboard pressure while our failure to convert pressure into points gave them increasing hope that they could somehow sneak a victory,” Burger recalls painfully.
“That’s the biggest thing that we learnt. It doesn’t matter how much rugby you play, if you don’t build scoreboard pressure on the opposition then you can end up losing the match,” he said. “Hopefully we don’t have a repeat of that for this quarter-final and we can get the scoreboard ticking early. There are certainly enough of us here in England who will never forget that day and we want to make things right.”
That contingent are all four years older now, with a good quotient of them now on the wrong side of 30, and Burger says that experience is vital in handling the pressure of a knock-out game.
“To state the obvious, when you are younger, you only know what you know. When you are older you have experienced a few losses and the pain that comes with them. I lost in two quarter-finals in 2003 and 2011 and in 2007 we went all the way. We have learnt from our mistakes so we can probably prepare the youngsters for what happens if it does not go well.
“The biggest thing for us is that we have a calmness about us,” the 32-year-old said. “Obviously we draw a lot from the younger players’ energy, and they have got to bring the dynamicism while we have to bring the leadership. There is a big onus on the senior players to make the right calls on the field. I think decision-making is something the senior group pride themselves on.”