There’s a perception that flyhalves should be the most sought after and most expensive players in the professional era, and make no mistake many a team owner or director of rugby will throw a mint at a Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu or a Dan Carter.
But as important and as expensive is the anchor of the scrum, the tighthead prop. Yes, those usually rotund and non-athletic looking fellows who give rugby its reputation for being a sport for all shapes and sizes.
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Scrummaging remains an important part of the modern game, some might say more important than ever given the way they are used in this era to milk the penalties that can either put your team onto an attacking footing or act as a release of pressure.
And it just so happens that South Africa is a fertile land when it comes to the production of the players who wear No3 on their backs, and the depth of tightheads available to the Springboks has been a big part of South Africa’s success over the past decade or so.
The Dream Team has a few exceptional candidates spread over the past 30 years, with the depth available underlined by the fact that one of the heroes of the 1995 RWC triumph, Balie Swart, who bravely scrummed himself to a standstill in the Kings Park mud-bath that hosted the semi-final against France, didn’t even make the list of options.
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But here they are:
1. BJ Botha
Brendon James Botha, known as BJ, was part of the 2007 Springbok squad that won the World Cup in France, but that he was not part of the team that played and won the final is a testament to how much strength South Africa had in that position at the time. For those who played against him will tell you he was one of the most uncomfortable props to play against in that era.
Part of the reason for that was that he was relatively short, and would take the opposing loosehead props into a zone of discomfort that rendered them less effective and prevented them from getting momentum.
Schooled at Durban High School, Botha played 49 Currie Cup games for the Sharks and 32 for the Durban franchise in Super Rugby, and he was an influential but unsung cog in the Sharks machine that finished top of the Super 14 log in 2007.
That was the Sharks’ most successful season in the competition, and they were on the cusp of winning the Durban final against the Bulls until a bizarre sequence of events led ultimately to the Bryan Habana try after the hooter that broke Durban hearts.
The value of the tighthead in modern rugby was underlined by Botha being lured away from South African rugby at a relatively young age by Munster, for whom he played 111 games between 2011 and 2016 before finishing his career in France (Biarritz and Lyon).
2. Frans Malherbe
Malherbe has widely been regarded as the best tighthead in the world for several years. What isn’t arguable is that he is the most decorated No3 in the history of the game as he has won two Rugby World Cup titles, in 2019 and 2023. At both tournaments he was a starting frontranker and an immovable object that helped laid the platform for the Boks’ ultimate success.
Jozua Francois Malherbe captained Paarl Boys' High School, where he also captained in his matric year and didn’t take long to break into senior rugby after attending the Western Province Academy in 2010, making both his WP and Stormers debuts in 2011 at a very young age for a tighthead prop.
He got his first taste of silverware when WP won the Currie Cup in 2012, beating the Sharks in Durban, and it was from then that he started making waves at national level. He was part of Heyneke Meyer’s squad at the 2015 Rugby World Cup, which provided the grounding for his later successes in that tournament.
Malherbe is rare for a modern player in the sense that he has only ever played for one club (WP/Stormers), and that despite getting several big financial offers to play overseas. He has played 76 games for his country and although out at the moment with a neck injury he could edge towards the three figure marks in caps when he returns to the field. He is a valuable member of the Bok squad when fit.
3. CJ van der Linde
Props are usually valued most for their primary role in the scrum, and here were few better at that than Christoffel Johannes van der Linde, but he arguably first announced himself as a standout by scoring a spectacular try against England at Twickenham in the second Test of a two match series in 2006.
The Boks had lost the first game and they’d also been hammered by Ireland prior to that and the coach of the time, Jake White, was under threat for his job. However, when Van der Linde went over shortly before halftime it completely changed the momentum of the game and also the momentum of that phase of White’s stint as coach.
They went on to win comfortably, their first win at Twickenham in 10 years, and after that the Boks gathered the winning touch that propelled them to the 2007 World Cup triumph, of which Van der Linde’s strong scrumming was an integral part.
Van der Linde had a long and well travelled career and after making his debut for the Cheetahs in 2001, for whom he played for several seasons, he went on to play first class rugby in Ireland, England and France in addition to his additional stints with the Stormers and Lions.
He was a strong scrummager and a good tactician, as evidenced by the fact that he has been the Monpellier scrum coach since he retired from rugby in 2015.
4. Jannie du Plessis
Jannie du Plessis first announced himself while playing for the Cheetahs when he was still first still a medical student in Bloemfontein and then doing his internship as a doctor. From the Eastern Free State town of Bethlehem, he was in the shadow of his brother, the hooker Bismarck, in the early part of his career but then following his move to the Sharks his career blossomed and he became an integral member of the Durban team for several seasons.
Neither Jannie nor Bismarck was named to the Springboks' original squad for the 2007 Rugby World Cup, but both eventually joined the squad. After Bismarck had already been called up to replace Pierre Spies, Jannie was called up to replace BJ Botha after Botha blew out a knee against the USA in the Boks' final pool match in Montpellier.
He received the call notifying him of his selection from Springbok selection panel member Peter Jooste shortly after finishing an all-night shift at a Bloemfontein hospital on the evening of 30 September, during which he performed a Caesarean section. When interviewed after his selection, he said that his first sleep since 29 September was "an hour or so on the plane from Bloemfontein to Cape Town", where he travelled to do his required paperwork before joining the Boks in France. Less than a week later he was in the Bok team that played the quarterfinal against Fiji in Marseille.
Van der Linde was back for the final but Du Plessis went on after that to play more than 70 times for the Boks, and was an important feature of the Bok scrumming power at the next two World Cups - in New Zealand in 2011 and in England in 2015.
5. Cobus Visagie
If you spoke to players who played in the period from the end of the 1990s through to the early part of the 2000s you wouldn’t have got many who dissented with the view that Cobus Visagie, a product fo Paarl Gymnasium and Stellenbosch, was one of the strongest if the strongest scrumming tightheads in the game at that time.
He didn’t often show up in general play, but there were likenesses drawn with the legendary Hempies du Toit, also a product of Stellenbosch, when he arrived on the scene, with it all revolving around his strength as a scrummager. However, while he was backed by Nick Mallett, he didn’t get the same level of support from some of the Bok coaches who followed Mallett, and when he was passed over for the 2003 World Cup, when Rudolf Straeuli was the coach, Visagie opted to further his career playing club rugby in England.
Again, he was a tighthead, and tightheads attract big money offers, so maybe it was a no brainer for the player, but it does appear that South Africa might have missed out on Visagie’s best years as a rugby player. Tightheads do have a reputation for maturing later in life, and Visagie, when playing for Saracens, made it into the Guinness Premiership team of the season for three consecutive years.
He also represented the Barbarians (8 caps), World XV (3 caps) and the Southern Hemisphere XV that played in the Tsunami Relief game at Twickenham, before retiring from professional rugby in May 2009.