This World Cup has produced some wonderfully vivid memories but Wales’s quarter-final against an uber-physical South Africa will not be for the fragile of heart. A mildly diverting game of rugby? More a supreme test of manhood masquerading as family entertainment. Jamie Roberts is a qualified doctor rather than a Shakespearean scholar but, on the eve of Twickenham battle, there are distant Celtic-infused echoes of Henry V on the eve of Agincourt.
Listen, for example, to Roberts’ stark description of his most spectacular collision with the Springboks in Pretoria for the British and Irish Lions in 2009. “I’ll never forget the second Lions Test at Loftus Versfeld when there were five of us in the hospital afterwards,” he says, matter of factly. “Adam [Jones] came off with a shoulder which took two or three hours to get back in, Gethin smashed his face, O’Driscoll’s head was twice its normal size, I injured my wrist and ended up needing an operation, Tommy Bowe hurt his elbow. There were five of us in an ambulance going to the hospital.
“That’s what lies in store for us this weekend. It’s pretty gruesome but that’s the nature of the game now. You’ve got to be prepared to put your body on the line and take it to places where you haven’t been before. This week all the players are relaxed but ready for complete warfare come the 80 minutes.”
This, remember, is a qualified medic relating the casualty list from a rugby field, not a multi-vehicle pile-up. For Wales, the 2015 tournament has already been brutal, spitting out brave, broken young men on a weekly basis. Roberts reveals he and his team-mates have been attempting to rationalise the fallout. “We have sat down as players over dinner and tried to piece together why. And you can’t. Sometimes it is luck of the draw. There is no reason why. We’ve had a couple of ACLs [anterior cruciate ligament], Corey Allen to a hamstring, Liam Williams at the weekend. We have just been unlucky.”
Hopefully, there will be no more than a few bruises on either side this weekend; World Rugby, the sport’s governing body, is already on the back foot over rugby’s attrition rate despite zealously policed player welfare safeguards. Roberts, uniquely placed to weigh up both sides of the argument, remains phlegmatic as he braces himself for more voluntary punishment. “What can you do? Play sevens? Make it touch rugby? Those questions are for the governing body. Injuries have always been a part of the game. As a player you accept it’ll happen to you some time, you deal with it and try to come back stronger.”
Like a weary boxer, however, forced to expend a massive amount of energy in the early rounds against a bigger opponent the question is this: how much more punishment can Wales take? Their pool defeat by Australia was characteristically gallant but it has deposited them on the tougher side of the draw. Even for warriors such as Alun Wyn Jones, Gethin Jenkins, Sam Warburton and Taulupe Faletau it is going to be tough to bash a way through a revitalised Springbok side, who thrive in a close-quarters scrap.
“The way they play you are 80-90% towards losing the game if you lose the battle of the gainline,” Roberts says. “That’s the challenge: to get the mind right and put your bodies on the line for physical warfare.”
At 28 – going on 78 in terms of the stress his body has endured en route to becoming his country’s most-capped centre – Roberts is also fully aware this may be a last chance for a number of Wales players who narrowly failed to reach a World Cup final in New Zealand four years ago. Their desire, if anything, is even stronger now.
“It’s a huge factor,” Roberts says. “When you do all those hours of training you dream of playing in games of this magnitude and of seizing the opportunity.
“There are not many more brutal games to lose than a World Cup semi-final by a point. That motivates you. Each one of us has to bring that to the party. Cool heads, bodies on the line and make sure we make the right calls at the right time. We’ll be victorious if we all do that.”
How England could have done with a Test Lion like Roberts in their midfield at this World Cup, a proven big match player bright enough to be enrolling at Cambridge University after this World Cup to study for a part-time masters degree in medical science. When he plays well so do Wales: the 20-year-old Tyler Morgan could not wish for a more calming influence inside him in the Twickenham tumult. South Africa will be suitably respectful, having lost 12-6 to Wales in Cardiff last November.
This weekend, though, is the true litmus test of northern hemisphere nerve in the shape of four north-south quarter-finals. Roberts is aiming high – “It would be great to get four of us through, wouldn’t it? That would send the journos crazy” – but suspects it will ultimately boil down to Wales’s clarity of thought at key moments. “Slowly over the last five to seven years since the core of this squad has been together we’ve started making those right calls. Defensively we’ve kept teams out as well. We have to put all that together this weekend. It has to be a complete performance if we’re going to beat the Springboks. It’s not just going to happen, it’s going to take the perfect game from us.”
In that respect, the last 10 minutes of the pool game against England will be as ideal preparation as any. “Defensively there was no way they were scoring. When you see that resolve and what the guys have worked for in the last few months, the training camps, the pain, it’s all done for a reason, to make the right decisions when you are completely knackered. When you are gasping for breath you are not thinking about getting your breath, you are thinking about the next play. It’s always about mental focus.”
Wales will give everything but only if they can disarm South Africa’s power game will Dr Roberts be spared further trauma.
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