Springboks toughen up in bootcamp

The refusal of Cronje, a bearded Afrikaner, to share a room with a black team-mate, Quinton Davids, had meant uncomfortable questions. It was time for the Springboks, black, coloured, white, to really learn about each other. They knew the message was stark: learn to bond or say goodbye to a dream.

Sam remembers Ashwin Willemse, the young black winger, standing up at the camp and telling his teammates: "Look you guys, I am one of you. Accept me for what I am." By the end, he said, everybody had accepted each other. They were a team, perhaps for the first time.

Sam is convinced that if it had not been for this extraordinary trip, South Africa's chances against England tomorrow might be slim to nonexistent. Instead, desperation had forged togetherness.

At their headquarters at Fremantle, there's been almost a revivalist fervour about them. You can see it best in Joost van der Westhuizen's eyes, surely still the most blazing in rugby. If an English rugby player uttered something as corny as "going out there with passion and a song in my heart", there'd be a few sniggers. When old Joost says it, he just sounds intense as hell.

In this great old scrum-half, the last link with the 1995 champions, you can recognise the danger for England. He rails against old Springboks who've criticised the current breed saying "when you're down and people step on you, you stand up".

They come over as if they're fed up at being trampled on for too long. Attacked by compatriots who think they've let down their country, Englishmen who say violence is their only weapon, a world which thinks their game still stinks of racism . . . no wonder they felt beleaguered.

Yet, it has been possible here to feel they really have turned the corner. There is a young new team, completely different from the one marmalised at Twickenham, and all we're getting is fighting talk instead of talk about not fighting.

"If the turning point off the field was the camp, the turning point on it was the match in August against the All Blacks in Dunedin," he says. Coming off a soul-destroying 52-16 demolition by New Zealand in Pretoria, they lost the Dunedin return 19-11 but only after a titanic effort based on old-fashioned Springbok values. It wasn't pretty but Matfield reckoned it showed they could beat any side in the world. "I believe we can win this World Cup too," he says.

Few others believe it, though. Controversy dogs them right up to the game. Yet, oddly, perhaps their contentious selection of a white, one-cap rookie Christo Bezuidenhout rather than the more experienced black prop Lawrence Sephaka tells of unity rather than division.

For it would have been easier for coach Rudi Straeuli to pick Sephaka because he must have known the decision would cause an outcry back home, with only one non-white player in the starting line-up and two in the 22. The country's quota protocol normally demands three.

But everyone here was happy to accept Straeuli's decision had been made purely on rugby grounds. Anyway, he said, he was confident any one of his 22, black or white, was ready to "lay his body on the line for his team-mates and his country".

You will not need to tell Clive Woodward about the bull-headed spirit that can be generated by the sense of indignation at being unloved, underappreciated and insulted. After all, in a bar up the road from the Subiaco Oval here last Saturday, he did watch another English sporting team feed off this same unappetising diet.