Today could be a defining milestone in my international rugby career, the culmination of everything I’ve been working towards these past forty months, because at some point this afternoon – at a time hitherto known only to himself, the Rugby Football Union and Fleet Street’s finest – England head coach Brian Ashton will announce the England squad to travel to South Africa for the two tests in Bloemfontein (26th May) and Pretoria (2nd June).

There has been plenty of media comment that – far from being a valuable opportunity to gauge where England have reached this far from the Rugby World Cup beginning in September (in which a key group match will be against South Africa) - this expedition, imposed by the authorities’ desire to over-cram the international playing schedule & generate revenue, has become an unwelcome chore with every chance of seriously disrupting our defence of the William Webb Ellis trophy, especially since, when the strategic decision was taken that players still involved in the Heineken or European Challenge Cup finals would not be chosen for the tour party, nobody had imagined that Leicester and Wasps would be contesting the former and Bath the latter, thus rendering well over twenty key players unavailable.

Don’t believe a word of it. It’s self-evident that every match that England have played in the past two years has been an opportunity for established players to cement or destroy their reputations and for newer players on the fringe with RWC ambitions to put their wares in the shop window. At this stage there’s no point in hiding one’s light under a bushel or indeed seeking to avoid playing those massive, big-boned, hardy, aggressive Springboks in their own back yard lest they expose the broad yellow streak running down one’s back. Now it has become a case of ‘do or die’, the hour of destiny when the faint-hearted, the injured and the doubting Thomases really should step out of the way and let those who dare step up to the plate.

In these circumstances, dear reader, it will not surprise you that I have been somewhat nursing my aching shoulder blade in the last few days and certainly haven’t reported it to the England physios. Though I’m undecided whether it is doing much more than keeping my shoulder back (its most comfortable position) and providing a degree of psychological confidence, I have been wearing my ‘moob bra’ permanently since Thursday – well save for my Sunday morning golf game because it would have restricted my swing – and it has certainly helped, albeit at the cost of some discomfort from chafing around the arm pits.

What is slightly worrying, however, is that I awoke this morning – after a light but rewarding gym session last evening – with distinctly more pain in the shoulder, now less specifically under the shoulder blade but instead spreading down the outside of my right arm. If memory serves - and it is quite possible mine doesn’t - the last time I had (nearly eleven months of) this condition it was diagnosed as a trapped nerve and at one stage I was recommended surgery. Not to cure the problem, but simply to ‘deal with it’ by cutting through the nerve taking the pain signals to the brain - it was at the point where the consultant sat me down and told me there was about a ten percent chance I might be paralysed as a result of the procedure that I stood up, thanked him for his time and announced that I’d rather live with the discomfort … and over the next three months it gradually faded away.

My grandfather, a fine athlete in his time, used to have a subscription to a magazine called Athletics Weekly that I read avidly in my formative years, by which route one of my heroes soon became all-time Olympic track & field legend Al Oerter of the United States. Between 1956 and 1968 he won the Olympics discus gold medal on four consecutive occasions – in 1960 after recovering from near-fatal injuries received in a car accident; in 1964 after defying both the pain of a torn rib cartilage suffered six days before the competition and medical advice not to compete; and in 1968 with a torn thigh muscle and wearing a neck brace to combat the effect of a chronic disc problem. He even came fourth in the trials for the notional US team for the boycotted 1980 Olympics and was only prevented taking part in the US trials for Los Angeles in 1984 at the age of forty-seven by a strained Achilles tendon. Taking Al as my inspiration I shall play through the pain in South Africa and then make history in the Rugby World Cup … if selected of course.