Lock crisis? What lock crisis, asks CLINTON VAN DER BERG.
With a raft of South Africa’s tall timber sidelined by injury, there were genuine fears the Springboks were scraping the bottom of the barrel in their search for capable second rows.
Someone forgot to tell debutant Ruben van Heerden and Cobus Wiese.
In wildly different ways, both men were central to the Boks’ bruising triumph over Wales.
RECAP: Seven-try Boks blank Wales again
Van Heerden was simply untouchable, bossing the lineout with the poise of a seasoned campaigner, winning clean ball and needling opponents in the proud tradition of every self-respecting lock forward. As debuts go, it was nothing short of compelling.
Wiese offered less of a lineout threat but took his taste for violence into the loose exchanges instead. He rumbled hard, played his part in the buildup to brother Jasper’s try, and showed the kind of relentless work ethic that will have caught Rassie Erasmus’s eye. Big, hard, athletic, uncomplaining – what’s not to like? From heaving hay bales as a 12-year-old on a farm outside Upington to breaking his neck eight years ago, Wiese’s journey to this stage is quite some story.
The pair’s performance was emblematic of the entire scrum, which was thunderous against a Welsh pack that has always prided itself on its set-piece even as the wider Welsh game has faded in recent years.
Not tonight. Tonight the Boks turned the screws, and turned them hard. At times it was uncomfortable watching the Dragons go backwards, but that was the pattern all evening, as big men like Gerhard Steenekamp, Carlü Sadie and Wilco Louw imposed their power at every scrum and every collision.
Daan Human, the inscrutable scrum doctor, will have been pleased.
What makes it all the more remarkable is that this South African pack was a patchwork quilt, largely stitched together for the very first time. Yet if the tight five were the foundation, the evening belonged largely to eighthman Jasper Wiese, who made every one of his 53 minutes count.
Fearless and unyielding, he must be miserable to play against, carrying the ball as hard as he tackled, grinding forward like an old tractor engine that simply refuses to quit.
With one eye on the World Cup and the other on the looming series against the All Blacks, Erasmus finds himself with the happiest of problems: a surfeit of world-class talent to choose from.
Almost every selection he has made, and there have been plenty, continues to pay off handsomely.
Photo: David Rogers/Getty Images
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Lock crisis? What lock crisis, asks CLINTON VAN DER BERG.
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