Mouritz Botha: Blond With Bottle

There was nothing alluring about Louis Moolman or Moaner van Heerden, an engine-room pairing from hell who reduced many a pack to its component parts during their time in the Springbok side, and if Johannes de Bruyn had a hearts-and-flowers side to him, it was not obvious to the late Gordon Brown of blessed Lions memory. Brown built an entire after-dinner routine around events in Pretoria in 1974, when he sent De Bruyn’s glass eye flying from its socket and then watched, in a state of advanced petrification, as his opponent reinserted it, tufts of grass still attached, before heading back to the line-out for a continuation of the argument.

Even in the professional age, with its all-seeing cameras and citing officials, Bakkies Botha has managed to win himself a permanent place in the Springbok bestiary, and judging by the way the World Cup-winning hard man’s namesake performed on his first international start last weekend, there is no obvious reason to think that South African second-rowers have suddenly discovered pacifism. Mouritz Botha may have been playing for England, but he performed like every ultra-ruthless Bokke lock who ever took the field in a green shirt.

Yet the story of this Botha – the red-rose Botha – is positively dripping in romance, of the kind modern rugby effectively disowned the moment it sanctioned pay-for-play in the mid-1990s. This Botha never saw the inside of an academy, or won age-group honours, or bought himself a flash car while still in his teens because he was flush with sporting lucre. Instead, this Botha knows what it is to be made redundant from an office job, to wash carpets and strip asbestos for a living and to play grass-roots rugby for Bedford Athletic, who are not even the best team in Bedford.

Now a success at Saracens – he was one of the central figures in their drive towards the Premiership title last season – and revelling in his new-found status as a Test forward, he can afford to view his trials and tribulations as part of the great scheme of things. The plan did not seem quite so grand when he was trying to make his sporting way in South Africa, though. There were moments when he was playing club rugby in Cape Town when he wondered whether he was wasting his time.

“My last team back home were NNK,” he says, referring to Northern Northlink College, which, being a mouthful, benefits from the abbreviation. “What standard was it? Not great. The equivalent of National Division One rugby here – maybe Division Two. They gave us 250 rand if we won.” That being the vague equivalent of £20, it did not quite propel him into “don’t spend it all at once” territory. “It was just about enough for a night’s beer,” he says, emphasising the “just about” part of the sentence.

“I was 22

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