Legendary Springboks lock Victor Matfield picks the opponents who made him work, and saves the highest praise for England’s Simon Shaw.
The finest lineout technician of the professional era has gone back through the men who changed the feel of his week, from Jerry Collins to Richie McCaw but the one he keeps circling back to is the England lock who had to wait until he was 35 for a Lions Test.
“There were players I respected enormously,” the former Springboks captain told The Rings History Pod.
“Some because they could hurt you, some because they could outthink you, and a few because they could do both. Those were the difficult ones.”
Matfield won 127 caps for South Africa across 14 years, a World Cup in 2007 and three Super Rugby titles with the Bulls, and spent most of that time as the best read of an opposition lineout in the game. He watched players get bigger and quicker and teams get smarter, and by the end, he says, everybody knew everybody else’s tricks.
“But there were always certain men who made the week feel a little different,” he says. “You’d see their name on the team sheet and immediately know Saturday wasn’t going to be comfortable.”
That’s the part he wants understood first. “I remember sitting in changing rooms before some enormous matches, pulling the tape around my wrists, checking my boots, listening to the noise outside. You’d look around and nobody needed to say much, we knew exactly what was waiting for us. The hard part wasn’t the lineout; it was knowing what was coming and still having to deal with it.”
The one you felt coming
Jerry Collins won 48 caps for New Zealand and died in a car crash in France in 2015, at 34. Matfield doesn’t reach for anything complicated to describe him, and thinks that’s the point.
“You didn’t need someone to point him out, you knew where he was,” he says. “He had that presence about him, big shoulders, shaved head, and this look that made you think he wasn’t particularly interested in having a friendly afternoon. Jerry wasn’t complicated. If you had the ball he wanted to eat you, and if there was a loose ball with two or three bodies around it, he wasn’t going to stand back and watch.”
“There are tackles where you get back to your feet and quietly check that everything is still where it should be, and Jerry could give you those. But he wasn’t some madman running around trying to hurt people, he understood the game, and that gets forgotten. There was an honesty to the way he played, no hiding, no shortcuts.”
Ali Williams was always thinking
Ali Williams, 77 caps and a lock of the same generation, offered a different problem, and one Matfield openly enjoyed.
“People sometimes imagine lineouts as two tall blokes jumping in the air and trying to catch a ball, and I wish it had been that simple,” he says. “At that level, especially against New Zealand, it became a little game of chase. You changed the call because you thought they’d worked it out, then you wondered whether they knew you’d changed it. Ali loved that stuff. He’d be looking across, watching where I was standing, watching our lifters, and I was doing exactly the same to him.”
“He was also more athletic than people remember, so if your timing was slightly wrong, he could get into the air quickly, and suddenly the ball you thought was yours wasn’t yours anymore. That annoyed me. I can laugh about it now; I probably didn’t laugh much then.”
Simon Shaw was a horrible man to see
Matfield reserves his greatest praise for a lock who won 71 England caps between 1996 and 2011 without ever quite becoming the first name on anybody’s list.
Simon Shaw toured with the Lions in 1997, was called up in New Zealand in 2005, and played the full 80 in the 2007 World Cup final that Matfield’s Springboks won 15-6. He wasn’t in the matchday squad for the first Test in Durban in 2009. He came into the side for the second at Loftus Versfeld at 35, the oldest Test debutant in Lions history, and was named man of the match in a 28-25 defeat settled by Morné Steyn’s penalty two minutes into injury time.
“Simon Shaw was a horrible man to see standing on the other side of a lineout, and I mean that in the nicest possible way,” Matfield says. “He was enormous. I’d played against plenty of big locks, obviously; you don’t spend your career in the second row without getting used to looking at very large human beings, but Shaw had this combination of size and experience that made him awkward. He’d been around forever, at least it felt that way, and by the time the Lions came to South Africa in 2009 he knew every little trick a lock could know.”
“Our difficulty was around the contact area. He wasn’t the sort of player who moved easily, so if he got himself into a good position, you had a problem. And in the lineout you had to respect him. Maybe he didn’t always receive the attention some other locks did, but we knew. Players always know. You know who makes your job difficult, you know who forces you to spend another half hour looking at footage, you know who makes you change something you normally wouldn’t change. Simon was one of those men.”
“What impressed me most was that he never seemed interested in making things look pretty; he just did his job, and there’s something very difficult about playing against a man like that. He wasn’t trying to entertain anybody. He was trying to make your afternoon miserable, and he was very good at it.”
That second Test in Pretoria sent five Lions to hospital, Adam Jones with a dislocated shoulder and Gethin Jenkins with a fractured cheekbone among them, and it has become the reference point for the series. Matfield says he can still feel it when he thinks about it.
“Everything hurt, bodies everywhere, people getting patched up, nobody wanting to give an inch, and Simon belonged in a game like that,” he says.
“He had that old-fashioned hardness. You’d hit him and he wouldn’t make much fuss, you’d compete with him at the next lineout and there he was again. No drama, just work. I always respected players like that, because South African rugby understands that mentality very well. We like people who keep coming, and Simon kept coming.”
“He might not be the first name everybody mentions when they remember the great players of that Lions tour, but as the men who actually had to play against him, we remember. I certainly do.”
Paul O’Connell had done the homework
Paul O’Connell captained that 2009 tour and finished with 108 Ireland caps, and is the opponent Matfield says occupied him longest before kick-off.
“He wasn’t going to run over me, he wasn’t going to do something spectacular, he did his homework, and that worried me more,” Matfield says. “I spent hours looking at opposition throws, movements, little habits. Then you played Ireland, and Paul had been doing exactly the same thing.”
“I remember standing opposite him wondering how much he already knew. Has he seen that movement? Does he know where we’re going? Did we show him something earlier without realising it? That’s what a good lineout caller does to you, he gets inside your head a little bit, and Paul certainly got inside mine.”
“There are opponents you remember because of one big moment, and with Paul I don’t remember it that way. I remember the pressure, constant pressure. When you finish playing you don’t miss every opponent, let’s be honest about that, but I missed those battles.”
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Richie McCaw understood the afternoon
Richie McCaw played 148 Tests and captained New Zealand against Matfield’s South Africa often enough for the pair to become a fixture of the fixture. The thing Matfield keeps returning to isn’t the breakdown work, it’s what McCaw did with whichever referee was in front of him, which changed from one week to the next.
“Richie was a pain, and I mean that with enormous respect,” he says.
“You’d prepare all week for New Zealand, you’d talk about their backs, their kicking game, their lineout, then the match started and somehow Richie was everywhere. You’d think you had quick ball and suddenly everything slowed down. I used to wonder whether there were two of him.”
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“People talked a lot about Richie and referees, and we talked about it too, of course, every team did. You’d be standing there thinking, surely he can’t get away with that again, then you’d watch the referee wave play on. It drove you mad, but when I got older I appreciated it differently. He knew when to put his hands in, he knew when to get out, and most importantly he understood what the referee was allowing that particular afternoon. That’s intelligence. You can dislike it when you’re playing against it, but you have to respect it.”
“South Africa never tried to make life comfortable for him, because teams knew how important he was, so you wanted bodies on him and you wanted him getting up slowly. The problem was, he kept getting up. If you’re asking me about the opponent who made you work for absolutely everything, Richie belongs right at the top.”
Matfield retired after the 2015 World Cup with 127 caps, a South African record at the time, and says the scorelines have gone soft in the memory whilst the men haven’t. “The results start to fade a little, not the big ones, of course,” he says.
“I played with some frightening rugby players myself, so I knew what toughness looked like, but there were a handful on the other side who made me think, bloody hell, we have to earn this one today. Even now, years later, I can still picture them.”