Another feather in cap for Burger

[caption id="attachment_75323" align="alignright" width="200"] Schalk Burger[/caption]

Highlanders game 100th burst in Stormers’ colours

STORMERS flank Schalk Burger is one of those rare players who made his Super Rugby debut after a test debut, but then again, almost everything about Burger is rare.

Tomorrow, against the Highlanders at Dunedin’s Forsyth Barr Stadium – a facility that was not even in the planning stages when Burger’s professional career began – he will run out for the 100th time in Stormers’ colours.

It will cap a remarkable journey that started 11 years ago – against the Waratahs, at Newlands – in a back row alongside Corne Krige and Adri Badenhorst.

Burger burst on to the rugby landscape in 2002 as a 19-year-old human meteor, seemingly made up of pure energy and blond hair.

Burger had no regard for anyone’s safety, let alone his own, as he flew into rucks and tackles as if he were flying into a pile of pillows.

He played an instrumental part in the 2002 South African Under-21s winning the Junior World Championship on home soil. In 2003, he captained the under-21s in an unsuccessful defence of their title in England, which ended in semifinal defeat against the junior All Blacks.

Burger made his Springbok debut later that season, against Georgia at the 2003 World Cup. The world player of the year gong followed in 2004, the same year of his Stormers’ debut.

He won the Tri-Nations in 2004 and 2009, the World Cup in 2007 and a series against the British and Irish Lions in 2009.

In between, he had career-threatening neck injury in 2006 that required a fusion. By rights he should probably never have played again.

But he did and, when a serious knee injury cut him down in his prime in early 2012, and a near death experience from bacterial meningitis in 2013, he was told his career was over.

But Burger does not know the word quit, and his natural strength and competitive instincts are well above the ability of mere mortals.

It is 2015 and he is still haunting opponents across the globe.

Thirteen years on from that young dynamo though, Burger is a different player, more circumspect but no less brutal. He just chooses his moments more wisely.

Stormers coach Allister Coetzee said: “Schalk really is the ultimate warrior. Just to get back into the game after those injuries, never mind what he has achieved since, speaks volumes about the man’s character.”

Fellow back-rower Siya Kolisi is in awe of Burger. “It will be an honour to play alongside Schalk. Everyone knows he is my hero,” he said.

-Craig Ray