Putting a spring in the Bok step

Scotland coach Andy Robinson's tongue-in-cheek take on the Springboks' stimulants debacle this week: "That might explain why they finish games so strongly when other teams are tiring ..."

Springbok assistant coach Dick Muir confirmed his status as a happy-go-lucky fella, with the emphasis on lucky, by nailing a hole-in-one at the St Andrew's golf course on Wednesday. From our little understanding of golf, we realise the bloke who aces a hole has to buy the whole pub drinks. We just hope they had a Wednesday crowd, as St Andrew's can't be all that cheap.

JUST when Tightheads thought they'd seen it all, a Scottish rugby writer chipped in with an absolute first this week. He walked into the Boks' press conference on Thursday with his baby girl in his arms. Impressively, Gary Gold, Juan Smith and Jean de Villiers kept a straight face as the bloke jostled with the rest of the journos to put his dictaphone on the table, before retreating to the back of the room to breast feed, or do whatever modern rugby scribe dads do. When the baby started crying, somebody asked if it was Pat Lambie, the baby of the Bok team.

SPEAKING of errant colleagues, one of our number took to referring to Wales' new wing sensation, George North, as Peter North. Quick as a flash, one of his readers wrote back to remark that he might have his mind on other things, as Peter North would find the cheerleaders at a rugby field too distracting to ever get onto it, on account of his having been a porn film star in his past. Amusingly for the press corps, the Freudian slip came from our colleague having had occasion to watch enough of Peter North at work to know his real name. Like they say, you never really know a fellow hack until you've toured with him ...

IN South Africa, retired rugby players commentate for SuperSport (relax Owen, this one's not about you). In the United Kingdom, they apparently go looking for a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records, as former England international Kyran Bracken showed this week. The scrumhalf was on a game show where he and rugby league legend Martin Offiah competed to see who could catch the most eggs in a minute. The record was 31 unbroken eggs, and Bracken cleaned up with 38, while Offiah's winger's hands could only net him 21. Bracken also competed in Dancing On Ice in 2008, while Welsh star Gavin Henson is trying to get himself a place in their World Cup squad by competing in Strictly Come Dancing.

THE rest of the world may have marvelled at England's all-action game against Australia last weekend, which included tries from behind their tryline. But spare a thought for one Andy Sheridan, who came into the game expecting to be the star of the show as he did to the Aussie scrum what he did two years ago. With only about six scrums being completed in the whole game, the match was suddenly not exactly what Sheridan thought it would be. "You could say I was a bit put out," he told the Independent this week. "I went into the game expecting the scrums to be a bit of a mess, with lots of resets and recrimination. Instead, they were purely incidental as we started like drag racers and somehow kept up the high-tempo momentum."