Van der Linde ready to toe the line

RUGBY HEINEKEN CUP:It's been a frustrating time for Leinster's CJ van der Linde since his arrival from South Africa, writes JOHNNY WATTERSON

FOR SOME time CJ van der Linde’s toe problem was up there in the pantheon of mysterious sporting injuries alongside those of Spanish golfer Jose Maria Olazabal and former Irish winger Simon Geoghegan.

On the back of no real form, and a declaration from South Africa that no overseas players would be selected for the national squad, the Bloemfontein prop was then magically called up by the Springboks last month. Coach Peter de Villiers’ frontrow had been demolished by Martin Castrogiovanni and Leicester and a couple of the Bok players ended up injured and on the plane back home. The phone call came.

In many ways it was a desperate move by de Villiers as his Irish-based prop had played just three times for Leinster this season with game time last weekend bringing that number of outings to four. Last season he lined out nine times for the province and has now a total of 13 Leinster caps, five of those earned in the Heineken Cup.

The autumn call-up by de Villiers may well have been serendipitous and sparked new hopes in van der Linde’s mind of the next World Cup. But his time in Ireland to date has been a little more than frustrating. Apart from pulling his hamstring prior to Leinster’s match against Saracens to complicate his sorry tale, the prop was largely able to run around with the injured toe but unable to scrummage properly.

“It was the ligament underneath my foot. I tore the ligament off so scrumming wise I couldn’t really scrum,” he explains. “I could run if I injected it and stuff but I couldn’t scrum and that’s a big part of playing prop. Yeah, it was very frustrating because you can run around but you can’t do the basics that you were picked for.”

The 29-year-old went to doctors in Ireland and at home and while they offered some consolation as they knew what the issue was, their prognosis was freighted with dire possibilities. The toe injury was simply one of those dastardly problems that was simple enough to fix together but more complex to heal properly and even more fraught in terms of getting him to a position where he could play Heineken Cup and international rugby.

“The doctors I saw in Ireland and in South Africa in the beginning they said it could be the end of my rugby career, that it is a difficult thing to fix because there is not a lot of blood going there to heal the ligament,” he says.

“It’s not nice to hear stuff like that but you must have faith that usually it will work out. They said the testing part would be long before I started to play again. If I injured it again then probably it wouldn’t heal again. I’m through that part now, so I think the worst has gone. It was a month ago when it was still feeling painful but at the moment it’s feeling good.

“Definitely coming from South Africa to play and arriving in Ireland as a passenger just makes it frustrating, especially with the guys doing so well. You just want to get on the field and play some rugby, so this year I hope everything can change and I can be a part of it. Because you come from overseas you don’t want everyone to think you just come here for whatever the reason, so it wasn’t nice to sit on the sideline. Obviously we’re rugby players and want to play rugby. That’s why we were born.”

But getting over the problem that dogged him all through last season has turned into a potential problem for Leinster. Although the 57 times capped Springbok is contracted to stay in Dublin until the end of next season, the idea of being part of a South African side travelling to New Zealand to defend their title in the next World Cup is quite a lure. But van der Linde won’t be drawn.

“At the moment I am contracted until 2011 so I haven’t put my mind to the future. But I am contracted to Leinster,” he says. “There is a lot of talk about the World Cup but as I say I haven’t made up my mind there. I’m just focusing on getting back and playing well for Leinster. I like Ireland. It’s a very nice place and if I can stay longer, I definitely will.”

Cheika won’t be here to oversee that but part of his coaching job until the end of the season is to leave Leinster in good health and that means convincing van der Linde that whatever new coach comes in, Dublin is a good place for a tight head prop with one World Cup winner’s medal already in his pocket.