Alan Gedye @AlanChangeMan - Twitter Profile

16 days ago

South Africa plays the most violent, collision-hungry rugby on the planet, and it comes from a country that treats meat and fire as a national religion. The Springboks win the way a wrecking ball wins. Back-to-back world champions, built around a pack of enormous forwards and a bench so loaded with them that they once named a seven-one split, seven forwards and a single back, then dared the opposition to still be standing at the end. Their entire game is the collision. They want to hit you harder, more often, for longer, until you fold. It is the most physical identity in the sport, and it grows in telling soil. Because South Africa is, by a distance, the most carnivorous rugby nation alive. The braai, the open-fire barbecue, is the centre of social life there, a weekly act of devotion around a grid of sizzling meat. Biltong, air-dried spiced beef and venison, is the national snack, sold at every petrol station and chewed on the touchline. Boerewors, the farmer's sausage, is protected by law and has to be at least ninety percent meat to earn the name. Children grow up on kudu, springbok and ostrich, on a plate that treats animal protein as the obvious foundation of a meal. A Springbok forward is raised, quite literally, on the thing he is named after. Now the pedant's objection, answered before it arrives. The modern team kitchen runs no headline carnivore protocol. Their dietitians use the same periodised sports-science plans as everyone else, carbs timed around matches, the lot. Nobody is claiming beef is a secret training hack. The point is more interesting than that. The meat is upstream of all of it, in the culture that forms the player long before a nutritionist gets near him, the braai in the back garden, the biltong in the school bag, the unspoken sense that a man eats animals and gets on with it. Other nations reach a meat-heavy diet through a spreadsheet. South Africa reaches it by being South African. The same culture lights the braai and builds the man who runs straight through you. One appetite, expressed twice.