Thousands upon thousands of them trekked across the country from the Western Cape, upset by British rule, and established themselves in isolated communities further north. As Nel observed, those experiences still drive them on.He was brought up in Boksburg, a town in eastern Gauteng where Afrikaans culture dominated. He was imbued with a work ethic, with passion, with religion and with rugby. To talk to him is to be confronted by a mass of contradictions and a welter of passion, by a highly strung, vulnerable man with a purpose.

A changed man with a purpose, he would have it.”I am passionate about playing for my country,” he said last week during a brief hiatus in the one-day circus which is at present touring South Africa “It makes me so proud, my country. But I’ve got to show aggression when I bowl, it’s part of me, of who I am. It’s part and parcel of the way we’ve been brought up, of our history and culture. The Afrikaans player is always passionate about playing for his country. It’s the way you’re brought up, to believe that it is a privilege.”I do sometimes take it too far but you only get one chance, you don’t want to give it away, you want to do it so badly It’s all tied up with the Voortrek. “Lauren won a gold medal for Cameroon at the 2000 Sydney Olympics” might be true, but the relevance of that in a Premiership match over four years later was what?Given Darke’s appreciation of hand-to-hand combat, he would have risen several notches in the estimation of the live Sky audience had he fallen back on his pugilistic instincts as referee Graham Poll tried manfully to quell the uprising between Patrick Vieira and Roy Keane.

His captain, Graeme Smith, described him as “a bit of a nutter with white line fever”, obviously a potent combination. He must be alone in having been married in the middle of a Test match (against West Indies last year; the ceremony had been arranged 10 months earlier and was moved back from 4.30pm to 6.30pm). Yet he has engaged and enraged spectators and television audiences wherever he has played.The fact that Nel also has plenty of previous both on and off the pitch marks him out as a character. People cannot stop talking about him because he is always up to something. This is still early in his international career, but the way things are going he could become the patron of extremely irascible fast bowlers He barks, scowls, cajoles, sneers and bristles.