Good Day

For a new sporting mantra, as delivered by Johan van Graam when asked to describe the influence of the man sitting alongside him at their eve of semi-final press conference Fourie Du Preez.

It was, of course, the Springbok scrum-half and skipper who managed to get over in the corner for the match-winning try against Wales last week and the 33-year-old also boasts what is surely a unique record in the history of the sport in having faced the All Blacks on a dozen occasions and been on the winning side more often than he has lost. That is more than twice as many as the three Celtic nations have claimed in a combined 88 meetings with the New Zealanders.

Little wonder, then, that the team’s captain is held in such high regard by their management that the question elicited the following description from the Springboks assistant coach.

"His composure under pressure, his belief in himself, the ability to see things that others don't see,” said can Graam, before adding: “I believe a talent hits a target nobody else can hit, but a genius hits a target nobody else can see and that’s Fourie Du Preez."

That one seems sure to be up on a few clubhouse walls before the season is out.

Bad Day

For the ‘basketball on grass’ brigade, a vocal element within British rugby, to attempt to generate any new support for their unreconstructed views on the way rugby should be played.

Almost since the inception of Super Rugby and the international Rugby Championship those critics, devoted as they are to a more attritional style of play, have attempted to deride the sustained efforts in the southern hemisphere to help rugby become a more watchable and therefore more accessible sport.

It is actually debatable whether they have succeeded in those objectives since the English and French club leagues have become the most powerful in commercial terms.

However in competitive rugby terms the line-up for this weekend, the first time all four World Cup semi-finalists have come from the same hemisphere and, indeed, the same annual competition, could hardly deliver a more emphatic message about the benefits of taking a more ambitious approach to the game.

The key point which is so frequently misunderstood among these Europe commentators, is not that these teams seek to entertain for the sake of it. It is that they develop skills under intense pressure that allow them to execute in whatever way is required at key moments of big matches.

The best examples of that, then, are not the free-scoring of the All Blacks against France, Argentina against Ireland and Australia against both England and Scotland, but the way the Wallabies came through a try-less match against Wales in their pool decider and the Springboks went against their natural instincts to find the moment of inspiration required to open up the same courageous Wales side.