Lions have to tame the 'Beast' to rule jungle

John Carlin
26 Jun 2009

Tendai the 'Beast' Mtawarira is, by common consent, the front row forward the Lions will have to tame if they are to win tomorrow's Second Test against the Springboks. Fat chance.

In addition to being shockingly strong and outrageously fast, he has a secret weapon: karate.

Mtawarira, man of the match in last weekend's Test after he almost single-handedly wrecked the Lions scrum, has taken lessons in martial arts.

In Cape Town this week I spoke to his teacher, Hennie Bosman, a fearsome-looking former policeman who plays bad guys in movies - he is a tougher, bigger version of the Lee Van Cleef character in The Good, The Bad And The Ugly - and is a Seventh Dan in karate.

I have no idea what it entails to be a Seventh Dan but it has to be impressive: he was karate world champion in 2001, in the "full contact" version of the sport, the one in which you genuinely get hurt.

This Bosman bloke spent five weeks at the end of 2007 teaching the tricks of unarmed combat to the Natal Sharks, for whom Mtawarira plays.

"Of all the players, the Beast was especially receptive," Bosman said. "He is very driven but also humble; very willing to learn."

What Bosman taught the Sharks was how to use his combat techniques to break tackles; to hand off players; to escape holds; to spin in a tight spot, while in possession of the ball; to fall without injuring yourself; to play with a lower centre of gravity.

You can see the impact of all this in the way that Mtawarira, an astonishingly athletic loose-head prop, plays the game.

He drives low in the scrum; he is a ferocious tackler, ferocious in the charge; and wresting the ball away from him is like trying to snatch the blonde from King Kong.

Bosman told me he saw Mtawarira again last October at a coaching session he gave the Boks. "I had a brief chat with the Beast," said Bosman.

"He remembered me from a year earlier. He said, 'The stuff's working. I'm using it. It really works!' "

Maybe it could work for the Lions too. Bosman would be available to them - for a small fee, no doubt - in the event the Beast exposes them again as a bunch of weaklings.

Actually, the Beast will expose them. Let's not kid ourselves. The score last weekend, 26-21, flattered to deceive.

The Lions only made some headway once the Boks had taken their feet off the pedal and the Beast off the pitch.

It's hard to think of any way to stop the inevitable, save maybe recruiting Bosman into the Lions team now.

He's got English blood in him, it turns out, through his dad. Bald, six foot four, golf balls for knuckles, he is heavily muscular but lithe and very fast with his hands.

On the big screen he squares up to the likes of Jean-Claude Van Damme and pretends to lose to them.

On the pitch, playing for real, he'd be invincible.

Dress him in Lions red and watch the Beast's centre of gravity dissolve down his shorts.

Shocked Spain have Obama to blame

Spain, who are No1 in the FIFA world rankings by a mile and had gone 35 games without defeat, were beaten 2-0 by the United States in the semi-finals of the Confederations Cup, proof again of football's unique greatness and global appeal.

It is the team sport in which the utterly implausible happens with the greatest frequency.

There is no way such a result would be possible in, say, rugby; that the US or Japan would ever beat the Springboks or the All Blacks.

The capacity football has to smash the odds, make complete nonsense of form and defeat logic is maybe the big reason why it is the world's favourite pastime.

It is like life itself in its sheer unpredictability and like life too in that - no matter what - hope springs eternal.

Maybe, in this particular case, there were other forces at play, just as there were when the South Africans did the impossible in 1996 by winning the African Nations Cup.

Then, people attributed this most unlikely of triumphs to "the Mandela Magic". Could it be that we are in the presence of a similar phenomenon, the Obama Factor?

South Africa's World Cup will be half-full

In South Africa, be it politics or sport you are looking at, you have a choice: you can opt to focus on the dark side or the bright side, you can see the glass half-empty or half-full.

Opinion seems to be thus divided regarding the country's hosting of next year's football World Cup.

Given the choice exists and given life is short, I prefer to go for the less miserable option.

There's been a dress rehearsal under way these last couple of weeks for next year's tournament and the signs, all in all, seem to encourage an optimistic view of things.

Beyond the eight countries actually involved, the football world has not paid a huge amount of attention to the Confederations Cup, a competition which pits the winners of the six continental championships, the world champions and next year's World Cup host nation against one another.

But it's been entertaining enough and served as a dry run for when the biggest show in the world comes to the nation in 12 months' time.

The stadia, contrary to fears otherwise, have been largely full, even if this has been thanks in some cases to generous last-minute donations of free tickets. (They might try the idea in Italy's Serie A, where stadia tend to be embarrassingly empty these days.)

In the critical terrain of telecommunications, beaming signals to all ends of the globe, there has not been one glitch and the local camera work has been top class.

As for security, in a country bedevilled by crime, the fans do not seem to have reported much trouble.

The only victims we have heard of in the press are the Egyptian team, five of whose players had money and valuables stolen from their hotel rooms.

According to the police, they brought it on themselves.

The robbers, the police said, were prostitutes they invited to their hotel late at night.

"If you invite people who turn out to be security-unfriendly, then it is unfortunate because we can't follow you up to your room," was the dry comment his week of South Africa's deputy minister of police.