Bath's 'bomb squad' needs to be defused

CLOSE your eyes and imagine batting on a fiery Caribbean track in the 1980s, when West Indian fast bowlers ruled the world.

- CHEIS HEWETT

Disappointingly but predictably, you’re following on. Worse still, the quicks who scared the hell out of you in the first innings – Roberts, Holding, Croft, Garner – are sipping restful rum punches on the pavilion balcony, having given way to a quartet of cutthroat “finishers”: Marshall, Patterson, Clarke, Daniel.

It would look like cricket, it would sound like cricket – particularly with the ball bouncing off your skull – and it would definitely feel like cricket, as your ribs might attest. But would it actually BE cricket? Certainly not, my dear old thing. It would be sacrilege.

So how is it that legions of dedicated union folk, not all of them South Africans by any means, are entirely comfortable with the Springboks’ ‘bomb squad’ approach to Test rugby, designed and developed by the boundary-pushing provocateur Rassie Erasmus in his role as head coach of the back-toback world champions and now being copied by teams of all stamps and stripes?