Mike Greenaway: In-form Boks hungry to keep winning ball rolling

Victor Matfield. Photo / Natalie Slade

It has been pointed out to the Springboks that they have not won at Eden Park since 1937 - although those old enough to have seen the 1981 flour-bomb test will forever believe that pompous Clive Norling robbed the Boks with a contentious "foot up" penalty seven minutes into injury time (seldom has one Welshman drawn such a variety of expletives from one nation).

Be that as it may, winning again at the home of New Zealand rugby is a challenge the Springboks will heartily embrace.

As their captain, John Smit, says, "the core of this team has been around since 2004 and when you have a situation where most of the guys have 60 caps or more, new challenges bring out the best in us".

Last month the Boks had a host of fresh challenges. Just a week after the Bulls-Stormers Super 14 final they had to fly to Cardiff for a match celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Millennium Stadium opening.

They won in tough circumstances, flew back home and that weekend played France, their bogey side, and promptly put 40 points past the Six Nations champions.

A two-match series followed against Italy while the soccer World Cup was raging all around them and preparations were difficult given multiple distractions, from difficulty in finding training grounds to 24-hour vuvuzela symphonies.

The Boks were poor in the first test, in Witbank, because by their own admission they had taken the collective eye off the oval ball and focused it on the round one, but after much chastisement they bounced back to beat Italy by 55 points in the second test in what proved to be an excellent pre-Tri-Nations workout.

A week later they are in Auckland for the first of back-to-back tests against the team every South African boy plays against in his backyard. It really is still like that, cliche or not.

The last time the Boks visited these shores they won the Tri-Nations title in style, beating the All Blacks in Hamilton.

Yet the team that won that night - and indeed won five of their six Tri-Nations matches last season - has had a serious overhaul, not that anybody seems to have noticed - an indication of the good place Springbok rugby is in.

There is no Francois Steyn - he's now playing in France; Fourie du Preez is injured; so are Heinrich Brussow, mighty hooker Bismarck du Plessis and winger Odwa Ndungane, while Juan Smith is on compassionate leave and loosehead prop Beast Mtawarira is out because of a citizenship row.

In any other era, that would mean the guts of the team had been ripped out, but these Boks have barely missed a beat such is the rude health of their squad.

For only the third time the Springboks enter the Tri-Nations as defending champions, but never before have they had more depth in place for a successful title defence.

They also have confidence, experience, quality leadership, good form and very importantly, they have taken stock of the importance of keeping their momentum going into next year's Rugby World Cup.

They understand that if they are to lay the foundations for success in next year's tournament, they have to kick on in this Tri-Nations and win it again so the upward curve continues.

The Boks have built up a healthy head of steam and failure to defend the Tri-Nations will be a major disappointment for them.

Key to this are these two matches - and they are shaping up to be epic clashes. The Boks know it took seemingly forever to break the All Blacks' hold on them in the post-isolation era and now they've done it they do not want to surrender the psychological advantage.

The Boks lost 13 out of 16 tests to the All Blacks from 2001 to 2007, but have won four of the past six encounters, and are undefeated in the last three. They are hungry to keep the ball rolling.

* Mike Greenaway is a rugby writer for the Natal Mercury in Durban, South Africa