Forget the Blood Brothers

Years ago, when even I wasn't born, a football hack once sidled up to Liverpool coaching great Bill Shankly.

He had a question for him: Didn't the latest flavour of the month winger in English football remind him of a legendary former England wing?

"Aye," was the Scot's answer, but as the writer was scribbling away in shorthand, he weighed in with the proviso: "You have to remember that so-and-so is 67 now."

Hearing about Victor Matfield taking to hard training with the Bulls again after almost two years since his retirement, it reminded me of the Shankly anecdote.

The lineout work at the Bulls this year has been such that Matfield could have been on crutches and done a better job. So at some level, it makes sense that the 36-year-old could lace up his size 14s to help out the Bulls.

But then our reporting ridiculously took a speculative situation to its illogical conclusion by suggesting Matfield could avail himself for the Springboks, and by extension the 2015 World Cup.

Owing to his reputation as probably the best Springbok lock ever, there's a tendency to think Matfield is some kind of alien, as the boxer Bernard Hopkins recently described himself after retaining his world title at 48.

A lot of people forget that, by the time he quit the game, Matfield wasn't the same player who was man of the match in the 2007 World Cup final.

Back then, Matfield wasn't only a pest at the lineout. He was an additional loose forward in defence (ask Mathew Tait), an extra threat on the counter-attack, not to mention the tallest outside centre in history at 2.01m.

By the time he finished, his best work was reserved for his core duties.

The knee-jerk reaction to Matfield running a few shuttles on the Loftus Versfeld B fields is typically South African, where, to quote a colleague, we love to live our lives in the rearview mirror.

We spend so much time swimming in a sea of change and fretting about the future that we have a tendency to glorify the past simply because it has the answers.

But the truth is that Bakkies Botha's and Matfield's time is gone, and Eben Etzebeth and Pieter-Steph du Toit are the here and now.

One can understand the nerves about the Boks' second row given that it hasn't dominated the same way it used to when the Blood Brothers (Matfield and Botha) held sway between 2004 and 2011.

But the right way to get it like that again is by throwing the two youngsters into the deep end now.

It's already decided that they are the answer, so why don't we just back them and stop mollycoddling them by surrounding them with Bakkies and Matfield?

Besides, I can't see anyone bully and break "Ysterbeth" and Du Toit, regardless of the fact that their respective ages are 22 and 21.

Etzebeth has consistently shown that he belongs at international level, while Du Toit has given glimpses that he could be a bigger freak than Matfield: a No5 lock with No4 tendencies.

It is understandable that a Matfield "comeback" would generate excitement because South Africa produces more blunt-object locks like Paul Willemse and Etzebeth than it does the likes of the former Bulls captain.

But if we're so desperate to have Matfield in the picture, why doesn't Bok coach Heyneke Meyer recruit him as his lineout consultant in the two years leading up to the World Cup?

The Boks need an answer to the All Blacks' Sam Whitelock and Brodie Retallick, but it's not the Blood Brothers.