Making a major impact after feeling the energy within

JEAN DE VILLIERS INTERVIEW:JEAN DE VILLIERS has been watching the South Africa-England Test series on television, so he hardly needed updates from home. Even so, mates had been texting to inform him that the temperature at one point had reached 42 degrees. Some mates. He texted them back once saying it was minus nine in Limerick.

All part of the rich tapestry he has experienced with Munster. Even when initially struggling to justify his place in the Munster midfield, and then losing it, he maintains he never stopped enjoying his time here.

“I got a white Christmas,” he notes with a wry smile.

“I get a bowl of soup after training. I must say it’s been fantastic.”

De Villiers is a pleasant, modest and honest bloke, who admits that being dropped shook him out of his lethargy and forced him to regain his place on merit.

In his first foray abroad, and coming straight off an exhaustive summer series against the Lions and the Tri-Nations with scarcely a pause for breath, initially he struggled to come to terms with his new environs.

He admits he “started slowly and got dropped”, since when his own graph and that of the team’s have risen together – four wins out of five, and three tries in his last four appearances.

When he was demoted to the bench for the back-to-back meetings with Perpignan in December, it helped that his parents and sister had joined de Villiers and his fiancée, Marlie, for Christmas, but he had started to wonder whether he’d made the right career move.

“No one likes to get dropped. Definitely thoughts go through your head and you wonder if you’ve made the right choice. You’re angry at your coach, you’re angry at your team-mates, you’re angry at yourself. You blame everybody else but at the end of the day if you sit down and think about it, it goes back to you again. So it’s about the way that you approach it then, your attitude towards the coaches and towards the team. I think you learn from those experiences.”

The try away to Perpignan as a replacement was a turning point though, even in his cameo in the 24-23 home win, de Villiers says he could “just feel the energy within myself and wanting to make a difference, and that’s sometimes what you need.

“In making my decision to come abroad I think I was in a comfort zone back home in the position that I was in, captaining the Stormers side, being in the Springboks set-up and suddenly I found myself here, where I was all on my own, having to prove myself again with a bunch of guys I don’t know at all.

“They’re my friends now and my team-mates, and I think I’ve done pretty well up till now.”

Although he’s had worse experiences in rugby, it must have been an uncomfortable place for him to be, his confidence jolted, his position lost and, though he seems to have struck up an especially good rapport from early on with Ronan O’Gara, in an unfamiliar setting.

But through his career, and especially as Stormers captain, he’d seen some players respond better than others.

“I just made a conscious decision to not affect fellow team-mates and still giving them 100 per cent support from my point of view.”

Paul O’Connell has confirmed that de Villiers’ couldn’t have carried more bottles had he been the water boy, and de Villiers maintains that “there was never a stage when I wasn’t enjoying it. In sport and particularly in rugby, as in life there’s ups and downs. It’s easy to be happy when everything is going well but it’s about how you respond to setbacks in life and in rugby”.

Nor did the awful weather compound the unsure days.

“Rugby stays the same,” he reasons, “and I must say the professionalism within the Munster squad and with individuals is fantastic. I think the work ethic of the guys is what gets Munster through the tough times. It’s a great team to be a part of and I’m just happy to be a Munster player.”

The option to take up another year on his stint with Munster is probably now more appealing. However, given a ruptured shoulder and a torn bicep effectively wrecked both his 2003 and ’07 World Cups in an injury disrupted career, the expectation must be that he will return home at the end of the season given the onset of the Springboks’ defence of the Webb Ellis Trophy in 2011.

Needless to say, this is not the week to be considering such matters, whereas the onset of the Six Nations will afford him ample time to mull over that decision.

Either way, refreshed by the Six Nations hiatus, were Munster to make the knockout stages of the Heineken Cup then de Villiers can become a Trevor Halstead-type talisman for the team.

To that end, he’s smart enough to appreciate the importance of tomorrow night’s win-or-bust joust with Northampton, though he’s been well briefed anyway.

“Even before I came over I knew the history of Munster rugby and the success they’ve had in the Heineken Cup; I think in the last 12 years not failing to make the quarter-finals. Even now building up to this game the guys are saying this is the best time being a Munster player – the last game before the play-offs, do or die, everything to play for, the whole of Munster supporting you and just a great game to be a part of. So, hopefully I can do my part as a player.”