First things first: what has happened to our squad out here this past fortnight – the gastric bug, the injuries – will not be seen or offered by anyone as an excuse for how we perform here today. We are still professionals, we are still representing our country and we expect to and intend to perform accordingly. It certainly didn’t need me to be appointed captain for that to be the case. That has been the bottom line from the minute we arrived here.

But secondly, yes, psychologically this has all been a massive challenge. We’ve been coping with life with things turned upside down. It’s no help when you’re trying to prepare all week – as I was last week – but you can’t because you’ve been struck down by this virus. And then when you actually can train, you are preparing to play alongside Andy Farrell and then suddenly you find that he has gone down with it, too.

That is one example of what has been happening here every day. Losing Jason Robinson to injury yesterday was another of many blows we have had to take.

We have been living with it – well, there’s no alternative, is there? Last week we went out for a team meal and a couple of guys said they weren’t feeling too well, so the next day not only did they not appear for training, but there was one other who had gone down overnight. And then in training we picked up an injury. Every day seems like that.

When we flew from Johannesburg to Bloemfontein last week, we had a team bus and what was termed the “quarantine” minibus driving along in front of us. At dinner, we have had quarantine dinner tables, too. The joke with the quarantine minibus is that there’s a fight for space and the question is whether you are ill enough to warrant a seat on it.

The result is that the cast of faces in training has been changing daily. Usually when a new player arrives to join a squad mid-tour, it is something of a news item among us, but here players have been dropping out and new players arriving on an almost daily basis and it’s stopped being a big deal. There’s no pomp or ceremony when a new player arrives, it is more a case of: get on with it, get with it, settle in, ask questions and we’ll answer them, but get with the programme right here, right now.

I don’t think that is a bad thing. I feel the sense of determination around us is still all-pervasive and has been strengthened rather than weakened by the glut of bad news lining up daily for a seat on the quarantine minibus. But that does not divert from the fact that this is hardly the way to prepare for a Test match. It is a big enough challenge playing against a world-class side anyway without all this.

So how big is it now? People have asked me: is this as hard a circumstance as I’ve known in Test rugby? And my answer is to refer to games such as that first Lions Test in Christchurch two years ago, when we were getting beaten badly in the rain, struggling to get into the match and had our captain off injured in the first minute. Yes, such times are hard, but you have to look on them as tests of character.

Is this like the famous 1998 tour? No, nothing like it. This is well organised, comparatively we are much more experienced, we know what we are about and what we have to do.

So there is no all-pervading sense of doom and gloom here. Yes, it’s very, very hard but there is a Test match to play and we know that if we concentrate and if we don’t make the mistakes we made last weekend, then we’ve still got a good chance.

As of yesterday morning, I still didn’t know who was going to be in the side and who was going to be fit, I certainly didn’t know that I was going to be captain – it really is as bad as that. But what I do know is that if we set our minds on who we’ve got on the pitch rather than who is on the quarantine bus, then we can still do something here.