Of all the energies beating in and out of Croke Park on Saturday, maybe the most telling was antipathy. There is always a masquerade of friendship when it's over, of course. Always the same, dutiful recitations of respect. But not everything we had seen fell strictly within the jurisdiction of rugby football and, maybe, the knowledge of that deepened what we felt. For, if there's one thing worse than hostility from the big teams, it's ambivalence.

The look on Schalk Burger's face as he crossed for the only try had betrayed the Springboks' thinking. Nothing would have given them greater pleasure than to kick on from there, cleaving Brian O'Driscoll and Co into oblivion.

Just as Drew Mitchell celebrated a Wallaby try like a lotto winner at the Canal End two weeks earlier, Burger too seemed incapable of controlling the electricity in his body. He wrestled for escape from the embrace of team-mates, as if they had cattle prods in their hands. He fell, got up, then fell again. And finally, eyes burning like braziers, he shunted the football high into a refrigerated sky.

It was a reaction freighted with far more than a personal imperative. True, the crowd had been on his case, remembering that fugitive hand on Luke Fitzgerald's face last summer. But Burger, we can be sure, would have been disdainful of any acoustic tingling in his direction.

This was about the collective. About two serious groups of men, each on the others' blacklist.

To see the world champions set upon their hosts with such undisguised venom, then, was to catch a glimpse of how far Ireland have travelled. Bullies follow predicable lines when they're spooked and, on Saturday, South Africa rarely deviated from the cudgel.

The narrow reaches of their ambition played into Irish hands, for Dublin was palpably on a war-footing.

Maybe Gordon D'Arcy articulated the collective mindset best. "It's the same old South Africa," he reflected. "They literally try to bully you off the field. But there was no way that was going to happen today. I think, if there was any bullying to be done, we were going to do it." Paul O'Connell lay down the first marker, tanking into Victor Matfield under an early restart. It was the equivalent of hanging a flag from a turret. Ireland were, as O'Driscoll put it, identifying their territory and vowing to defend it.

"We weren't stepping back," explained the captain later. "When people come to our patch, we're not going to be bullied or pushed around."

Bullying and pushing around is something the 'Boks do rather well, mind. So we got a contest as primal as a bullfight. But, sometimes, the darkness of sport almost becomes its beauty.

Ireland and South Africa don't much like the look of one another and, here, the rugby was a shorthand for that feeling. Just three minutes had elapsed when Heinrich Brussow found himself cornered by an angry school of great whites and, thereafter, one of the world's most destructive flankers grew oddly circumspect.

D'Arcy, an early replacement for the luckless Paddy Wallace, could read the signals. "We probably wanted to play a little bit more rugby than they did," he reflected. "I think they just wanted to come and sneak a 10-9 win or something. Once they got that try, I think maybe they thought they could defend away from it. But we just kept going at them and going at them. We played smart football.

"Over this calendar year, we've shown that we are a physical team and we have a pack that can mix it with anybody in the world. They just showed exactly what they can do again today. When it comes down to the nitty, gritty, we can do it as strong and hard as anybody else."

Played in a kind of perpetual twilight, the game never flew on any artistic pretence. Ireland dominated possession, but the Springbok defence was unscrupulous and claustrophobic. It made for a procession of collisions that, even from the high safety of the stand, blew a cold wind through the chest.

Our worries for Jonathan Sexton as a target, though, never came to pass. He could have played in a cravat, such was his serenity. Out of the fog, he emerged with five penalties and a reputation magically enhanced.

He will know, though, that he had the benefit of an extraordinary pack to protect him. Ireland's scrum might have been set on sheet-ice, but in every other rudiment of forward play, the white eight moved incorrigibly. Set pieces aside, their speed to the breakdown was a revelation, their 'cleaning out' of rucks both ruthless and utterly clinical.

They looked like a pack with some personal issues and the appearance did not lie.

Jamie Heaslip had spoken in July of relishing the opportunity to get South Africa off the High Veldt and into a November Dublin. "Yeah, I said that," he agreed of his comments at the end of the Lions tour. "I was just very confident in the squad we have here in Ireland and the mentality we have generated over the last year.

"Some of us lost two games to them in the summer and, maybe, it felt like it wasn't fair justice. But it's South Africa. They 'ain't exactly ladyboys. They're big boys. They hit hard, man. And they can get around as well. They've got good, high work-rate. I think what it boiled down to today was winning the collision zones, getting around that corner. 'Cos they like to bring it around the corner a lot on the same kind of pattern.

"We targeted getting impact tackles in, slowing down their ball and I think we did that successfully. And I don't think they slowed down as much of our ball as they wanted to. We controlled the speed of ours very well and put them under a lot of pressure."

Asked if there was a particular edge to the game, he didn't demur.

"Yeah, I suppose so," said Heaslip. "Well there had to be. These guys are world champions, they know how to win. They're a very confrontational team, but we met them at the collisions. I can't say anymore. We were physical and I think we won most of the collision zones and won the game from it."

The last is no throwaway line. It's a virtual mission statement. Under Declan Kidney, this Irish team has become so savvied, so self-assured, they looked capable of seeing off all little eddies of crisis. Even the big shots of the southern hemisphere now have to play smart rugby to beat them.

And, on this evidence, Peter de Villiers isn't exactly Einstein.

Trampoline

Habitually the 'Boks rained leather into the Dublin sky as if Rob Kearney's aerial mastery with the Lions had been no more than a summer rumour. It was inexplicable. And the Irish full-back had a wonderful day, prompting D'Arcy to christen him "the human trampoline."

"You know you've got to question why a team's game-plan would be to kick balls to him," observed the Wexford man. Perhaps the answer lay in hubris.

No question, some of the South Africans looked tired and De Villiers did suggest that -- with the benefit of hindsight -- a few might profitably have been left at home after a long season. But there was such a one-dimensional strut to his team throughout, you just had to surmise that the 'Boks categorise imagination as excess baggage.

True, O'Driscoll's wonderful late tackle on Zane Kirchner probably averted late heartbreak. Yet, the thing about this Irish team is that you anticipate that kind of heroism. You expect them to ride a storm.

The captain said afterwards that he was taking Kircher down "with or without the ball." And his words reflected a bloody-mindedness we have not, historically, been accustomed to in the Irish game. But something different is brewing here and Heaven alone knows where it might take us.

On Saturday, Ireland beat a bigger, stronger, more celebrated team in a sometimes brutal contest. And they did it without as much as a backward glance.

Asked to encapsulate the dynamic between the teams, Jerry Flannery reflected: "I don't know any of them apart from Jean de Villiers, but I respect them all as you'd respect anyone. On the rugby side of it, I respect all that they've done in the game. I don't know if people sometimes talk to the media just because they're trying to sell a book (a veiled reference to John Smit's autobiography). You know, 'buy my book because there's some sort of animosity there...'

"But, as Irish players, I think we respect the South Africans."

It was the first hint of Irish equivocation all day.

- Vincent Hogan

Irish Independent