The Irish don’t see the sun. They look fragile, as though they’ve grown up in a Petri dish

Cast your mind back a few years. South African teams are in the midst of another infinite season of Super Rugby. Flights to Perth, trips to Dunedin, the most southerly rugby-playing outpost in the world. Jet lag, wear and tear, grumpiness from the four quadrants.

Long faces in the land of the long white cloud.

Now we’re playing up north, against the Irish and the Welsh mainly, sometimes against the English and French. It’s a whole new ball game. No time differences, no lag. And rugby is different there, too. The Irish don’t see the sun. They look fragile, as though they’ve grown up in a Petrie dish, or in a saucer in cotton wool. Don’t let first impressions mislead you.

Take Sam Prendergast, the Leinster flyhalf. He looks like a matchstick. That he’s got the best hands in Europe tends to get overlooked. Question: how do you play rugby against a praying mantis? Answer: don’t be seduced by his apparent fragility and the fact that coach Andy Farrell left him out of the British and Irish Lions squad for their tour of Australia last year; play against him with intelligence and care.

The Irish and their club sides, Leinster, Munster, Connacht and Ulster, don’t only bring differences of body type and philosophy — they bring different ways of playing. The Irish are canny, they disrupt, they counter-ruck with the glee of rampaging political zealots.

Their approach to attacking rugby is more sophisticated than the South Africans: they flood their attack with deep-lying dummy runners, or they play fast and flat around the fringes. You have to be on point, otherwise they’ll score points against you, big ones.

“We tend to defend well in local derbies because we understand the opposition’s attack,” says John Dobson, the coach of the Stormers, who will encounter the trickiness a Irish combination when they meet Ulster in their United Rugby Championship clash at Cape Town Stadium on Saturday.

“The Northern Hemisphere sides attack in a more sophisticated way: they stack the blindside and bring it back if they can’t get through there and, because they’re slick, they compromise your line speed when they do.”

Dobson was talking just after the Stormers had been spooked by a Scarlets side full of attacking brio at Cape Town Stadium on Saturday and was slightly wide-eyed himself. Before two late Yaqueen Ahmed tries the score was locked at 40-40 and with a difference set of circumstances the young Welsh visitors might just have burgled a famous win.

“We missed Ruhan [Nel, outside centre and skipper] because he brings such defensive organisation to us. Hopefully he’ll be fit for our game against Ulster.”

Monday morning saw Nel on the physio’s table at the Stormers’ High-Performance Centre in Bellville. Later that morning he was on the field, testing out his calf strain. He felt at the time he’d likely be ready to play against Ulster on Saturday afternoon and was subsequently named in the Stormers’ starting line-up, his first competitive rugby for three weeks.

With Stuart McCloskey in front of him, a big player who gives off major attacking vibes, the Stormers need all the ballast in the centre they can muster. Nel brings a steady hand to the tiller with his experience and calm.

The Irish don’t only bring a structured attacking game, they bring character. Take the combative Craig Casey, the Munster scrumhalf. Casey’s the kind of guy who would walk into a pub in a strange town and pick an argument with the resident dog. He’s pugnacious, which is a possibly more acceptable way of saying he’s something else, also beginning with “p”.

Good on him. With Casey Munster have done well to fill the hole left by Connor Murray so comprehensively. When it comes to the Irish side, who the Springboks play in Dublin on November 21, Casey is snapping at incumbent Jamison Gibson-Park’s heels.

It’s going to be a grand afternoon out at Lansdowne Road as Ireland and South Africa continue their long dialogue. Sometimes it’s turgid; sometimes sublime. But it’s always different, and so captivating in the best way.