Wales vs South Africa RWC 2015: Dragons have work cut out to live with formidable Springboks

Wales have spent so much of this World Cup in “last man standing” territory, it seems faintly ridiculous to suggest that this afternoon’s quarter-final meeting with South Africa at Twickenham is all about the survival instinct. Leigh Halfpenny and Rhys Webb did not even make it to the tournament proper; Hallam Amos, Cory Allen and the Williams boys, Liam and Scott, failed to reach the end of the pool stage. Putting it bluntly, the team is in bits.

But a broken clock is still right twice a day, and on that basis, Warren Gatland’s men can still cling to the belief that this is their time. It is, however, a fingernail job, given a statistical background that is not so much unkind to Wales as positively brutal. Their record against the Springboks is miserable in the extreme: two victories and a draw in 30 matches stretching back to the Edwardian era. Edward VII, that is, not Gareth Edwards.

Neil Jenkins, the outside-half from Pontypridd who played in the first of those wins and now earns a living as the Red Dragons’ kicking coach, did not try to sugar-coat it in his eve-of-Test address. “Where are the Springboks biggest threats? How long have you got?” he asked. “They’re a world-class outfit across the field.”

Yet if Wales can plot a route through the first 20 minutes of what is certain to be an eye-wateringly physical encounter – if they can take what the South Africans throw at them from the kick-off and keep taking it until the intensity generated by the likes of Schalk Burger and Bismarck du Plessis drops off just a little – they have the rock-like inner strength, hewn from the granite slab of adversity, to make a fist of it in the last half-hour.

Should they fail, all manner of Celtic misery may follow. In fact, it could well be a wipe-out. Scotland, who face the Wallabies in the last of the quarters tomorrow afternoon, are distant second favourites, not least because they have given up hope of running two suspended forwards, the hooker Ross Ford and the lock Jonny Gray, in their pack. As for Ireland, the sole European side to qualify for the knockout stage as group winners, tomorrow’s meeting with Argentina at the Millennium Stadium is rather less straightforward than many observers appear to think.

If the Pumas are not a million miles from being a top-four rugby nation, the Six Nations champions are a long way short of full strength up front, thanks to the injury absences of Paul O’Connell and Peter O’Mahony and the one-match ban slapped on Sean O’Brien by a judicial officer who failed to see the funny side of the flanker’s comic-book punch on the French lock and principal wind-up expert Pascal Papé six days ago.

Therefore, a meaningful Welsh challenge will keep northern hemisphere spirits high, so there were reasons to welcome Jenkins’ eminently sane assessment of his team’s prospects. “The last time we played South Africa, in Cardiff back in November, we beat them,” he said. “We should also have won when we played them in Nelspruit last summer: when you’re 30-17 up with eight or nine minutes to go and you don’t win, it’s hard to take. We know we can do it, because we’ve done it in the past. If we bring our ‘A’ game…”

What was even harder to take from the Welsh perspective was the failure to see off Australia last weekend, despite spending a dozen minutes within a gnat’s crotchet of the Wallaby line at the tipping point of the contest. And with the luxury of a two-man advantage to boot. It is safe to assume that the scale of the rollocking dished out to the decision-makers in the aftermath of that mess-up registered 11 on a 10-point scale.

“There’s been a fair bit said,” acknowledged Jenkins, the last vestiges of disbelief still etched into his features. “Things don’t always go right in Test rugby, but you have to come out with points from those situations. There were clear overlaps available to us, but we didn’t make the correct decisions. The important thing to say now is that we’ve done the analysis and we’re looking to put it to bed. If we find ourselves in that situation again, we must score.”

But for the unusual length of the Welsh casualty list, it would be tempting to argue that the Springboks are also suffering on the personnel front. They lost their captain, the centre Jean de Villiers, early in the pool stage and there is no sign of their vice-captain, the World Cup-winning lock Victor Matfield, for this one. There again, the view of many in South Africa is that these absences will prove to be a positive rather than a negative.

Neither De Villiers nor Matfield were in the first flush of youth when they arrived on these shores and, despite the loyalty shown them by the head coach, Heyneke Meyer, it was never clear that they were part of the strongest available combination. Now that Damian de Allende and Jesse Kriel are reunited in midfield and Lood de Jager is paired with the astonishing Eben Etzebeth in the engine room of the scrum, they look a whole lot more potent.

Not to put too fine a point on it, they look seriously formidable in the back five of the scrum, where the platform provided by the two young locks is helping the 24-carat loose unit of Burger, Francois Louw and Duane Vermeulen to perform with such venomous intent. Against anyone other than Wales, the Boks could confidently expect to establish superiority in this potentially decisive area.

Unfortunately for them, they are not playing “anyone other”. Wales are pretty damned good themselves when it comes to shaping a contest through their locks and back-rowers: Luke Charteris and Alun Wyn Jones; Dan Lydiate, Sam Warburton and Toby Faletau… there are precious few seven-stone weaklings among that little lot. If the set-piece battle turns out to be “scrum neutral” and the line-out ends up evens, the 10-man scrap in the loose will be one for the connoisseur.

There is another potential advantage for Wales: the fitness, or lack of it, of the influential Springbok scrum-half Fourie du Preez. Meyer’s latest choice as captain, he will take the field with a persistent back problem that continues to affect his kicking game and there must be a chance that, in the white heat of a World Cup knockout tie, he will go the same way as De Villiers and Matfield.

In which case, the Boks will have no choice but to run Ruan Pienaar at half-back – which might not be great news for Wales after all. Pienaar may not be blessed with quite the same management skills as Du Preez, but he can be an inspirational sort at the back end of a tight one.

Together with the outsized flanker Willem Alberts and the outstanding hooker Adriaan Strauss, he is a dream substitute. That being the case, Wales may have to switch to survival mode in the last quarter, as well as the first.

Wales 29-19 South Africa, Cardiff, June 1999

Two of the current Wales coaching team, Rob Howley and Neil Jenkins, formed the half-back partnership in the first game played at the new Millennium Stadium and it was Jenkins who hogged the scoring, accumulating 19 points with the boot. The Swansea centre Mark Taylor and Cardiff wing Gareth Thomas bagged the tries.

Wales 12-6 South Africa, Cardiff, November 2014

There were no tries when Wales ended a 16-match losing run against the Boks. Narrowly ahead through four Leigh Halfpenny penalties to two from Pat Lambie, they had to scrummage for their lives in the closing minutes. The match was scarred when Jean de Villiers, the visiting captain, suffered a dislocated kneecap.