HOLIDAY SNAP: Several members of Namibia's squad have taken time off work to play in the Rugby World Cup

LONDON, 23 Sept - Namibia’s match-day squad to face world champions New Zealand at the Olympic Stadium on Thursday will feature eight amateur players, including four students, a foreign exchange broker, an insurance broker and a man who works in a bicycle shop.

With a 31-man squad also featuring construction firm boss Johnny Redelinghuys, who will drive up to 340km a day just to get to training and back in the capital Windhoek, and cylinder construction firm manager Darryl De La Harpe, who gets up at 4am to go training, nothing could offer a more stark contrast to the All Blacks’ handsomely funded, super-slick professional operation.

Yet there is a bit of a romantic throwback feel to their ‘mission impossible’ quest in London, which captain Jacques Burger insists is actually a tribute to the extraordinary sacrifices his eight-to-five workers’ brigade continue to make for Namibian rugby.

"They make me feel quite humble," said Burger of the squad’s amateurs, such as prop Redelinghuys, who has made it to a third World Cup despite having to fit in his often solitary training while running his business. He spends hours in his car every day just to make team practice sessions.

NATIONAL PRIDE

Burger, who will lead the team on Thursday, is the country’s one rugby star. The Saracens’ big hitter was voted one of the best five players in RWC 2011 despite his side having been given a familiar couple of drubbings.

Yet he is adamant that RWC 2015 is not about him. "For us as a nation, it’s definitely about these guys who work eight-to-five, they’ve offered up so much. They’re incredible. They wake up at four, five in the morning, start training at six, have to to go to work all day and come back in the evening, six to half-seven, which is so challenging.

"I’m massively impressed with what they put in and the level they perform at. They’re not just good rugby players but good human beings. What they do day-to-day has massively changed my take on sport."

It is a fascinating mix of professional players who ply their trade everywhere from Romania to New Zealand and whose passion for the game persuades them to keep battling on for no great reward except for what they see as the ultimate satisfaction of having done their country proud and, this year, the prospect they could break their dispiriting World Cup winless streak. Currently, it stands at 15 matches, 15 losses.

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

At their rainy Cobham base on Tuesday, Redelinghuys was disappointed not to earn selection in coach Phil Davies’s 23, all of whom are savouring the prospect of facing the New Zealand haka, even if it is followed by the likelihood of an avalanche of points.

"Don’t look at the scoreboard," has been the ex-Welsh international Davies’s message to his men. "Just concentrate on the performance."

And Redelinghuys reckons that, with his old college buddy-turned-superstar Burger leading the fight, they will not be the sacrificial lambs of old. No-one mentions the 142-0 defeat by Australia at RWC 2003 any more. Those days are gone, says Redelinghuys.

There have been times, he adds, when he has dragged himself out of bed at 4am for an early training session before starting work at seven and has wondered to himself, "Why the hell am I doing this?"

He knows it has never been for money, but it has always been for love.

"Why am I doing this? Because these World Cup experiences make it all worthwhile. Going to the Olympic Stadium and facing the All Blacks?" he says. "That is the ultimate for us."

NAMIBIA'S AMATEURS READY TO TACKLE NEW ZEALAND

Starting XV

Jaco Engels (prop) - coach and consultant at Windhoek school

Tinus du Plessis (flanker) - foreign exchange broker

Johan Tromp (full-back) salesman at an outdoor cycling shop

Replacements

Louis van der Westhuizen - student

Raoul Larson - student teacher

Janco Venter - engineering student

Rohan Kitshoff - mechanical engineer at a brewery

Eneill Buitendag - insurance broker

Other amateurs in the squad

Johnny Redelinghuys - construction firm boss

Darryl de la Harpe - manager of his father's cylinder company

AJ de Klerk - farmer

Danie Van Wyk - engineer at a diamond mining company

Also:

PJ van Lill - a dentist who is currently playing professional rugby at Bayonne, France

RNS ic/pg/kd/sw