Schalk Burger (File)

Comment: Rob Houwing, Sport24 chief writer

Johannesburg – There is some strong reason to buy into Springbok coach Peter de Villiers’s theatrically passionate defence on Monday of Schalk Burger as an “honourable person”, among other virtues.

Off the rugby field the big flank is, by all accounts, your typically gregarious, chilled and outdoors-loving South African bloke, and part of an especially strongly-glued family into the bargain.

De Villiers may be on the button, too, in reminding that on a rugby field Burger is among the most physical and confrontational specimens you will find: a bastion of quite awesome commitment and passion.

And abrasive rugby players - those who simply get unavoidable, varying strains of “white-line fever” from the moment they take to the pitch - are always going to run the risk of testing the parameters of law-book legality.

Burger often has, his battery of yellow cards, in particular, the stuff of dubious near-legend. If you measured them in commemorative beer mugs, he’d have a brimming bar cabinet.

The latest flashpoint is slightly different from most of the others, however, because his eye-gouging - or eye “interference” if you prefer to employ an unnecessarily softer tag - on the Lions’ Luke Fitzgerald shifts him into a deeper compartment of disgrace.

It is considered a particularly wretched, filthy thing to do and puts him among a global gallery of rogues that includes New Zealanders like Richard Loe and Troy Flavell, any number of French players down the years, quite honestly, as well as other more recent offenders like Sergio Parisse, the Italian captain, and Munster flank Alan Quinlan.

In the last-named player’s case, his Heineken Cup crime led to the scuppering of his Lions tour here.

Television evidence

Burger will not be feeling good about it, one imagines, not least because television evidence from Loftus hardly absolves him from responsibility; it made his eight-week suspension inevitable.

Indeed, he may have been fortunate not to be ordered to sit out the entire Tri-Nations, instead of just a chunk of it.

He will also be as acutely aware as anyone that his idiocy came within a whisker – had he been red-carded in the opening minute in Pretoria – of costing South Africa the Test and quite possibly subsequently the series too.

But he will serve his time, hopefully be humbled and contrite, and resume his rightful employ as a formidable international rugby star.

Yet I use the word “international” with a minor degree of caution, given that this affair comes at a peculiarly bad time for 50-cap Burger, not enjoying his best season by any means, and increasingly the subject of debate on whether, indeed, he truly still qualifies as an authentic fetcher/open-sider.

Now the British media have sometimes been as guilty of sanctimony and jaundice recently as ours can be, jumping onto a general Springbok foul-play bandwagon while conveniently side-stepping instances in which Lions players - several - flirted with undue violence during the bloody Loftus battle.

They have also not been slow to pooh-pooh South Africa’s quest to be branded a great side – just one this week was Nick Cain of The Times.

But if his overall piece might well have gone down like a lead balloon in these parts, sections of it would have found widespread approval, most notably this: “The player who was a constant thorn for the Lions (over the first two Tests) was Heinrich Brussow, and the advantages of having a Neil Back-type open-side scavenger were writ large in this series.

“His omission for Burger in the second Test very nearly backfired spectacularly.”

Cain added that Burger appeared to have “fallen from the radar” as a world-class presence for the moment.

He might have added that South Africa’s general loose forward stocks remain as astonishingly abundant as ever, a further threat to the stability of Burger’s Springbok status.

There are stealthy-footed and ambitious burrowers galore, with Brussow atop a list that also includes Deon Stegmann, Luke Watson, Cobus Grobbelaar and the Sharks’ dual whippets Keegan Daniel and Jacques Botes.

Steely incumbent

If Burger is perhaps to carve out a more “blind-side” career in later life, then he faces competition from people like steely incumbent Juan Smith, Jean Deysel and the outstanding, articulate Emerging Springbok captain Dewald Potgieter of the Bulls, who is versatile enough for either a No 7 or 6 role.

Similarly adaptable – between No 7 and 8 – is the Stormers’ sturdy and muscular Duane Vermeulen.

Meanwhile at No 8 Ryan Kankowski is patiently awaiting his turn to topple Pierre Spies for the Bok shirt, and there are rumours, in fact, he may be named there for the dead-rubber Test at Coca-Cola Park.

At only 26, yet considering the rare battering his body takes through his unrelenting, iron competitiveness, might we already have witnessed the heyday of Schalk Willem Petrus Burger?

The next eight weeks, at least, will provide no platform for this iconic fellow to allay our fears.

And fresh-faced pretenders to his throne, both international and Currie Cup, will be desirous of seizing on any opportunity to beef reputations in his void, I’ll bet you that much …