t first, there was no great cause for alarm. Pieter‑Steph du Toit felt a blow to his left thigh, hobbled from the field and watched the rest of the game from the bench. Even as the injury began to swell towards full time, he thought little of it. He had experienced a similar injury as a high school player a decade earlier, and that had turned out fine.
Twenty-eight tackles against the All Blacks on Saturday night. Player of the match as South Africa became the first country to. And as Du Toit hunted down Jordie Barrett with the same relentless vindictiveness with which he had hunted down George Ford four years earlier, there was an aura of indestructibility to him that feels utterly at odds with the cruel misfortunes he has endured.
By the time the wound could finally be stitched together, Du Toit had lost nearly 10kg, most of it in muscle mass from the injured thigh. Much of the damage to the nerve endings could not be repaired. It would be more than a year before he played rugby again. At which point Du Toit had to fight his toughest battle: convincing everyone he could go to the well again, that his best days were not in the past, that he could play a third World Cup at the age of 31.
“I always joke that if there’s a white plastic bag that blows over the field, he would probably chase that down as well,” Nienaber said of the man they call the Malmesbury Missile. “He was phenomenal. Defence is my department and he was exceptional. I must say in the last couple of games, he wanted it desperately.”
Afterwards, Du Toit clutched his match award and his second World Cup winner’s medal, and reflected on the journey they had all taken. “I guess as a team we like drama,” he observed. Perhaps when you have almost lost a limb, that extra sprint no longer feels like such a burden. And perhaps when you have stared straight into the abyss, the sight of a marauding All Black no longer seems to hold very much fear at all.
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