Wallace expects Boks to raise stakes

IRELAND v SOUTH AFRICA: The Irish openside flanker is not impressed with suggestions that South Africa will not be up for Saturday's clash, writes JOHNNY WATTERSON

IN THE land of bluffs and double bluffs, Croke Park and the Boks can’t come quickly enough. In the land of bluffs and double bluffs, plain speaking is king.

Coach Peter de Villiers – whose garment-laden language has moved from Schalk Burger’s massaging of Luke Fitzgerald’s eyes and his opinion that the effete Lions should wear tutus to Ireland dressed in camouflage, or, was that the Lions in camouflage? – has declared that Ireland are better than the British and Irish Lions no less.

Ireland maintains that despite defeat by two club sides and France, South Africa are still kings of the world.

The Boks infer that the Irish Lions are out for revenge after the disappointment of the summer, but the Irish players say it is all overblown.

The media have billed it as a battle between the southern hemisphere champions and the northern hemisphere Grand Slam winners. The players explain that it’s just another Test match. Inevitably the truth lies some where in between.

David Wallace has been through all of this before, the pre-match hype and the 360 angles that go with it. With the Lions, with Ireland, with Munster, the Irish openside flanker takes it all with typical restraint. Put it to him that South Africa’s muddling through their summer tour suggests they might not be up for the Irish match and he seems almost affronted, mildly so naturally.

“I wouldn’t believe that for a second,” he says. “They’ll be very aware that it has been billed as the Grand Slam champions against the Tri Nations/World Cup champions. They will certainly be turning up and really wanting to win this game.

“It’s up to us to stand up to that. I don’t agree this is a good time to be playing them. There is the fear of the backlash as well and they’re going to come with their very best game. I wouldn’t be complacent at all. I’d be the other side of that fence in that they are really going to raise their game.”

Another way to prod Wallace is to suggest that he is somehow lacking in the groundhog line of work that players such as Richie McCaw and his opposite number this week, Heinrich Broussow, excel.

Few dispute that what France did to South Africa for the first half an hour just over a week ago was text-book management of an aggressive, physical team but Wallace bridles at the suggestion that he is simply the backrow gazelle, the athletic ball-carrier and ill-equipped to dog it out at the bottom of a ruck with Bakkies Botha, Victor Matfield and Broussow ripping away at various body parts.

“For years, I’ve been getting that,” says Wallace. “Sometimes it’s a little harsh saying I don’t have that side to my game . . . I suppose it’s not the main focus as a player, there’s the ball-carrying and I like to get out among the backs.

“It’s always an area that needs some work because it doesn’t come naturally to me but when you focus on it, you can do just as good a job and one part of it will be negating the likes of Broussow and the other side of that is trying to turn over ball yourself, which is something I will try to focus on this weekend.”

Wallace has faced South Africa in Bloemfontein and Cape Town in 2004 and in Lansdowne Road in 2006, where he played with Denis Leamy at number eight and Neil Best at blindside.

Ireland won that one 32-15 with their biggest win in the 18 meetings since 1906.

But Wallace points out that time has moved on and the tags of Grand Slam and World Cup collected since the last meeting must count for something.

“You don’t want to remain the same player mentally or physically,” he says.

“It’s very much a personal thing, how you’re really feeling about your own game, how your body is physically, so many things are factors in your actual mood. You have to be greedy in what you want to achieve from your career and keep wanting more and more.

“That’s certainly how we looked at it last year and coming into this year. Put to one side anything you’ve won or achieved up to now, forget about it, because you want to get as much as you can from the rest of your career.

“When you retire, you can look back on all those things. But it doesn’t help to think about them while you’re still playing.”

In his 33rd year and ninth season as an international, one of the most explosive players on these islands should know.