SARACENS v MUNSTER/THE FRONTROW BATTLE: Johnny Wattersontalks to the born-again South African tighthead aiming to intimidate and ultimately overpower Marcus Horan

AFTER GOD revealed himself to Cobus Visagie in 1997, he never looked back. He walked the straight and narrow. When Jesus Christ became his Lord and his living God, the Saracens and former South African tighthead prop found a path, not just of renewal but also of lifestyle and balance, of clarity and of ambition.

Visagie is not religious. Religion, he says, divides people. But there came a time in his life when he believed there was nothing he could do to be saved. The physical birth had not been enough and the spiritual birth had not yet happened. He was a student at Stellenbosch University and found that his life, which had been going somewhere, was quickly going nowhere.

Visagie was pursuing a degree in Commerce, was in the top three in his first year in accounting and had success on the rugby field. He was playing for the Western Province under-20 side. He was a prop with a brain, and he was, very much, going places.

Then, in his first year of university tragedy struck: his mother died of cancer. She had been a significant influence on his life, a devout woman of prayer, who lived what he once called a "Christlike life". Soon afterwards his father remarried.

Visagie was 19 years old and his life began to fall apart. He became full of bitterness toward his father, unable to forgive the fact he had remarried so quickly following his mother's death. He had been brought up in a religious house and the concept of prayer and of Christ and of living a meaningful, Christian life was not alien. Still, the teenage prop hit the booze. Fixing himself required a rebirth.

A ginger goatee and that inescapable prop physique set Visagie apart on the training ground at St Albans. As rugby goes this is Rolls Royce turf. St Albans, a commuter belt of long back gardens and tree-lined roads, is the most expensive part of Britain for housing outside of central London. The real estate of Old Albanian RFC on which Saracens are practising their lineouts and scrummaging is the outfield of a cricket pitch.

Still, boot-sized clods flick in the air and yards of turf concertina like green carpet behind the scrum machine.

Standing 6ft 1in, Visagie appears small among the secondrows and flankers, the towering Hugh Vyvyan and the limping warhorse Richard Hill. But there is serious intensity in the way he goes about the trigonometry of exerting forces and angles in the frontrow, of anchoring his scrum, kinking that of the opposition. In the arcane world of tighthead propping, Visagie at his peak was regarded as one of the best in the world and he remains the master in terms of Premiership rugby. At 34 he is no longer a Test player but his knowledge of the mechanics of slipping binds and shaping the outcome of a set-piece draws respect from many clubs, not least Munster.

Five years ago Munster had a choice to make. They were allowed sign one overseas player and approached the Springbok. Ultimately they backed off the prop and went for broke with the record-breaking New Zealand fullback Christian Cullen. The prop went to Saracens, where he has become player and teacher.

"The reasons that I really went off the rails was that my mother died and my father remarried quickly and I rebelled against my father, Hannes, with whom I always had a great relationship," he explains.

"My mother died just after I left school. I was 19. There were reasons for that rebelling but the relationship with my father has been restored. That was a direct result of becoming born again. I am a person that values relationships very highly.

"It was clear that my life was not going in the right direction. I was always a high achiever academically and in sport and both started to suffer. I wasn't being myself. I grew up in a religious house but I left it after school for four or five years. I didn't want religion - you know, to go to church every day - I thought there was no power in it.

"Then I found a different way of worshipping the living God that was in a way that changed people's lives and made them useful in general life. My friends who became born again before me helped me in that way. They were stingy; they were then more generous. They had a temper; they didn't have a temper. They were introvert; they became more open to social interaction.

"I am talking about the Spirit and living a life where I am not afraid that Jesus Christ is my Lord and will make me do things. All the things the Lord has led me to do, led to create the life of me. I am very happily married. My children are healthy. I am highly respected in this club. I don't think it would have been this way if I had not become born again."

The threads of Visagie's rugby and personal life are inseparably woven. But for all of his powers, he has never played in a World Cup. Last year, he was, for a last desperate time, again part of South Africa's squad for the finals in France, when an elbow injury in July brought his run with the Springboks crashing to an end. He had also missed the 2003 World Cup through injury. But he smiles and sees a half-full glass. He has survived career-threatening wrist and ankle injuries and has had reconstructive surgery on a mangled elbow.

"I'm still going and I enjoy it. That is a big thing," he says. "I'm physically able and I've a healthy body and I give God all the glory for the healing that has taken place in my life. I think my individual ambitions have gone. I think they died last year and it's very much what I, as a senior player, an ex-international player, can now do within the Saracens set up."

This week Declan Kidney described the Saracens scrum as a "machine". The Munster scrum coach, Paul McCarthy, said the Saracens set-piece against Ospreys in the quarter-final was the toughest he had analysed in his time with Munster.

Visagie has never played against Marcus Horan or John Hayes or Freddie Pucciariello. Nor has he ever scrummed down against Ireland, his only flavour of Irish frontrow style coming from Saracens' visit to Ulster in the 2005-2006 European season.

"I've got to be honest, it doesn't really make a difference," he says.

"For such a game it's probably going more towards Test rugby and the importance of being dominant almost to the point of intimidation. I think in that way the forwards are going to play an important role. You have teams like New Zealand, who can be battered up front but they still have the smarts to run around you once they get possession.

"I'm not sure that the forwards battle will be the only battle. I think Munster have a very complete game, a very good kicking game. They've got a back line that can attack hard and . . . wings that can score tries."

Visagie first made an appearance on the international stage in 1999 against Italy and under the coaching of Heyneke Meyer, who was recently added to the expanding list of candidates for the Ireland job, became the cornerstone of the frontrow, scrummaging opposition into the ground with relative ease.

By then he had qualified as a chartered accountant and had considered not playing rugby as a professional.

The two years later, in 2001, when he was considered to have the most valuable right shoulder in the South African game, he was drug tested 30 minutes after leaving the field in a Currie Cup match in which he broke a wrist. The test result proved positive for the anabolic steroid nandrolone.

Protesting his innocence, he controversially cleared his name with the help of doctors from the University of Birmingham, who argued successfully that his body produced excessive amounts of the drug when he played rugby.

With that crisis negotiated, he fell out of love with the game and two years later again considered reverting to the financial world.

"In 2003 I was very disillusioned about rugby in South Africa and I didn't want to play again but wanted to pursue my career with Price Waterhouse Cooper. That was a crossroads and I think that's what has made my approach to rugby a healthy approach. I don't feel I need rugby. But I enjoy it.

"Also, it is very important for me as a Christian to see what influence I can have on other players and I think that has been a characteristic of my career so far."

He is a thinker about the game and a talker about the game and has had to adjust in a field position that has greatly evolved over the past 10 years.

Much more is now expected of all props. The engagement has changed a number of times. The rules have changed too. How players should bind and the way it is refereed have changed.

At one point rules and referees favoured the side struggling in the scrum; now they favour the dominant set-piece. When Visagie was at his peak the bias was very much toward safety and protecting the weaker unit.

He has also had to adjust with a club that has repeatedly changed coaches and, in the early days at least, had little vision of where it was going. When he joined Saracens in November 2003, he rang his father and told him he was "officially playing with the worst team I've ever played with in my life".

One of the backrows then was Don Barrell, a 17-year-old. Visagie laughs: "He's still here but he's not 17."

Munster may be the biggest challenge of his club career and, depending on the result, the last. In the gloaming of his career, he is being pushed by the Samoan Census Johnston, his 26-year-old, 20-stone understudy.

But Visagie has seen too much to feel discomfited.

"I don't think I'm highly talented," he says reflectively."I've just tried. But any little bit that I've got from God I've tried to use it to the best of my ability. That is my great motivation; that one day I believe there will be a day of reckoning and I am able to stand in front of a living God and say I've done everything that I should have done and I've been a good and faithful servant."

Cobus Visagie: South African by birth and Saracens by the grace of God.