Boks juggle selection as Robinson holds silence

Jason Robinson is not a great one for talking to those who upset him - this current burst of deafening silence is not his first - so if any England player manages to get on the captain's nerves over the next 48 hours, the home dressing-room at Twickenham will presumably resemble a Trappist monastery before Saturday's eagerly awaited Test match with the Springboks. The world champions may even break new ground, for there are no known instances of a captain conducting his team talk in semaphore on a point of principle.

Jason Robinson is not a great one for talking to those who upset him - this current burst of deafening silence is not his first - so if any England player manages to get on the captain's nerves over the next 48 hours, the home dressing-room at Twickenham will presumably resemble a Trappist monastery before Saturday's eagerly awaited Test match with the Springboks. The world champions may even break new ground, for there are no known instances of a captain conducting his team talk in semaphore on a point of principle.

Robinson is in a huge stew at the moment, as a result of what he considers to be unwarranted and unacceptable intrusion into his private life by a handful of national newspapers. He flatly refused to attend yesterday's scheduled press conference at the team hotel in Surrey - Mike Tindall, the vice-captain, pitched up instead - and he will have no dealings with the media until business with the Boks is concluded.

Where football leads, rugby often follows: it is only a few weeks since David Beckham buttoned his expensively manicured lip in protest against media attacks on his team following the World Cup qualifying draw in Austria.

But there is precious little common ground between the two incidents. Beckham and his colleagues took umbrage at some relentless mickey-taking following a comically flawed performance in the national cause; Robinson finds himself on the wrong end of a lurid obsession with a part of his private life that falls squarely into the category of past history.

The Sale full-back wrote about his relationship with his former partner, and the son they had together, in an autobiography published last year; his wife Amanda discussed the subject at length in the same pages. Presumably, Robinson felt that by drawing back the curtain on this corner of his life, everything that needed saying would be said. But the dynamics of celebrity do not work like that, as he discovered in the week leading into last year's World Cup final, and has rediscovered in recent days.

By making his current stand, he may well have exacerbated his own problem; in some corners of what used to be Fleet Street this will be seen as red rag to a bull. But it is a bold stand none the less, and he is perfectly within his rights to defend his privacy in whatever way he sees fit. He has the support of the England management, and there has not been a murmur of dissent from any of his colleagues - least of all from Tindall, whose own considerable profile in the public prints has little to do with his lines of running or his crash-tackling technique.

"Have I found the media interest troubling? I'm not telling you," said the Bath centre, whose relationship with the Princess Royal's daughter, Zara Phillips, has had sections of the press camped outside his door, positively frothing at the mouth. "When it comes to the personal stuff, you do what's right for you and get on with your life." Asked about Robinson, he would only say that the man who beat him to the temporary captaincy in Jonny Wilkinson's enforced absence had done "an awesome job in setting an attacking precedent for the team".

If England think they have problems, the South African potential for unmitigated strife is always far greater. Yesterday, it emerged that the tourists' coach, Jake White, had altered his original selection plans for this weekend's match as a direct result of the sensitivities surrounding the racial balance of the side in this new, enlightened era for the Springbok game.

White had planned to drop one of his black players, the 50-cap wing Breyton Paulse, for Jacque Fourie in an effort to minimise the potential effects of England's kicking game. But when another black wing, Ashwin Willemse, dropped out through injury, the coach was left with only one non-white player in his preferred starting line-up, the tight-head prop Eddie Andrews. As there is an unwritten policy that the Boks should field at least two black players in Test matches, Paulse will play against England, with Fourie among the replacements.

"We operate in a completely different environment now, and I bought into the parameters when I took the job," said White, entirely relaxed about the situation despite the obvious difficulties of running a team at the top end of the world game without a completely free hand in selection. "Anyway, we're still talking about the backline that won the Tri-Nations. It is not as though we're running around with people who don't know what they're doing."

Willemse, who has a broken toe, will not play again on this trip. As expected, Jean de Villiers of Western Province replaces him on the left wing.