When the final episode of Chasing the Sun is shown on M-Net on Sunday evening it will be exactly one year on from the eve of the 2019 World Cup final that will be it’s central focus.
Perhaps it is the months we spent under what felt like house arrest because of the coronavirus, maybe it has been the absence of rugby for most of this year, but somehow it feels hard to fathom that the nervous night before the deciding game was a full 12 months ago. Maybe it doesn’t feel like yesterday, but certainly not a year.
It was a week that was started of course by that nervy semifinal win over Wales, and the nation owes a lot to Francois Louw and Handre Pollard, the two men who got the South Africans home. Although as we saw in last week’s penultimate episode of Chasing the Sun, the patient game-plan adopted by the Boks against Wales was planned. And it worked. But it wasn’t pretty, and it fed the narrative of England, after their massive semifinal win over the All Blacks, being overwhelming favourites.
Not that the Welsh game really impacted on who started as favourites. Any team beating the All Blacks so comprehensively in a semifinal would start as favourites in a final, and until man finally starts to do what he never does, which is learn from history, that will probably remain the case in future.
I was invited into a different part of Tokyo into the high-rise hotel where the respected English rugby writers Stephen Jones and Owen Slot were residing to participate in a panel discussion that functioned as the podcast of the writers representing the Times stable (The Times and the Sunday Times). The excellent chief sportswriter at that group, David Walsh, and Alex Lowe were also part of the discussion, with yours truly representing the South African view.
Needless to say, the South African view was listened to, but not taken that seriously. All I heard for the 40-odd minutes was how good England were in their semifinal - it was the best England performance Jones had ever seen and he has seen a lot - and how boring the Boks were in beating Wales.
The theme was mighty mighty England and poor unlucky Wales, who, it was felt, deserved to be in the final based on their Six Nations triumph earlier in the year and the perception that Warren Gatland deserved a fitting send-off as his time as Wales coach came to an end. Never mind that I had read the tournament previews of some of the writers in that discussion - they had predicted that the Boks would win the World Cup before the tournament started. What had changed?
What had changed was that there had been one mesmeric performance that had completely swept away any unemotional common sense. And yes, history was being ignored.
What everyone was doing, and I pointed it out in my turn to speak, was forgetting the lesson of 1995. I reminded Jones that he was present when Jonah Lomu ran over Michael Catt several times when England were trounced by the All Blacks in the Newlands semifinal. Did anyone foresee that All Black team losing? Nope. They were overwhelming favourites for the Johannesburg final that they lost.
And that sequence, often involving the All Blacks, had been repeated again and again. If the semifinal win over the All Blacks really was England’s best performance ever, did it mean that they may have played their final already? No-one seemed to ask the question.
But that podcast panel discussion wasn’t the only example that week of English, and here I am not referring to the team and players but their supporters and media, over-confidence.
Indeed, on the morning of the Bok/Wales semifinal, before that game was even played, I happened to share a hotel lift jammed (this was pre-Covid remember) with England supporters. They were raving about their team’s performance the day before when someone asked the question - “Why don’t we see if we can get tickets and stay on for the final?” The response nearly floored me - the consensus was that the final had been played and that the deciding game would just be an anti-climax. What could beat what had been seen at the Yokohama International Stadium the previous day?
We know about former England player Matt Dawson writing that he wouldn’t select a single South African player into a combined England/Bok team, we know how that was filtered through to the Boks and how they made it work for them, as the comments of opposition so often have helped them before, when it mattered most.
Everywhere I went that week there seemed to be over-confident English people. A top English sports photographer, I won’t mention his name, bumped into me in one of the Tokyo underground stations and was quite confounded when I pointed out to him that he was already talking about England as if they were champions.
Which, according to former Springbok captain John Smit was also happening in England itself. Speaking on the World Cup final Relived programme that was screened on SuperSport during lockdown, Smit related how he had got hold of a communication from the RFU to debenture holders urging them to renew on the basis that they would want to have private suites at the home of the 2019 Rugby World Cup champions.
Perhaps the only English people who weren’t overly confident were the England players and their coaches. Or at least they knew better than to motivate the Boks. Their coach, Eddie Jones, is usually a motor-mouth before a big game and loves to chide his opposition. That week he was as still as a doorknob.
The Boks weren’t over-confident but I had enough exposure to them that week to know they were quietly confident. And quiet confidence often prevails in a final. Two days before the final the media were invited to a lunch by the Bok coaches. I sat next to Erasmus. He asked me what I thought would happen. I said it would be a 50-50 game, his team had the one pack in the tournament that could hurt England.
Erasmus responded by saying that he agreed it was 50-50, but that if his team played as well as it could, indeed if both teams left nothing out there and played to their full potential, it would be the Boks who would win. And he was pretty adamant about that. And it was enough to convince me to go with a Bok win in my SuperSport preview to the final which appears below:
--------------------------- Gavin's World Cup Final preview ---------------------------
IT'S 50-50 BUT BOKS HAVE REASON TO FEEL CONFIDENT
England will start Saturday’s Rugby World Cup final as the favourites at both the bookies and with most pundits, but there is a quiet confidence coming out of the South African camp that is not misplaced.
Springbok coach Rassie Erasmus will admit he was caught a bit off-guard by England being his team’s opponents in the final. The Boks were always confident of making it to this point, but they were piling up the analysis on the All Blacks, who they expected to make it through the other side of the draw.
That is not to say that the Boks don’t respect England. Indeed, Erasmus did say towards the start of the World Cup, even before the opener against the All Blacks in the same Yokohama International Stadium where the final will be played on Saturday, that they were a team he was worried about.
He also said after his team lost to the All Blacks, when asked what he thought of his side’s chances of reversing the 10-point loss in the final, that he wouldn’t bank on the Kiwis getting to the decider. He mentioned England as a team that were standing in their way.
But the homework was being done on New Zealand, not England, so there was a hurried change this past week and the Boks were effectively left with six day to prepare. Should that worry them though? No, it shouldn’t, for here is a fact - the Boks' brains-trust have actually been working on England longer than any other team in the less than two years since Rassie Erasmus and his long-time right hand man Jacques Nienaber took charge.
SEVEN MONTHS OF FOCUS ON ENGLAND IN 2018
In fact, here’s the thing - those two were working on analysing England long before Erasmus was officially appointed to the Springbok head coaching role along with the director of rugby position that he first came back from Ireland to fill.
Erasmus is not being economical with the truth when he says that his first intention when he agreed to leave Munster, where he was very happy and content, was to help South African rugby dig itself out of the parlous position it had fallen into by helping guide Allister Coetzee.
That though was before he left Ireland. It soon became clear to Erasmus, and most observers, that Erasmus and Coetzee wouldn’t be able to team up like they did years earlier at Western Province and the Stormers. Coetzee didn’t want that and he’d made it pretty clear he wanted to be the man in charge. It will be recalled that he’d suffered a similar “demotion” at WP when Gert Smal came in as director of rugby in 2013.
So by the time Erasmus got back to South Africa and had moved back to his house in Durbanville in November 2017, he pretty much knew that he was going to be the Bok coach the following year, for after all as director he was the man who had the say. Together with Nienaber they started plotting then for their first series, which happened to be against an England team that, at that point, had built up a formidable reputation in a mostly winning first two years of the Eddie Jones era.
Erasmus was determined to start the process of winning that first series to kick-start the process of redeeming South African rugby’s lost prize. Together with Nienaber, before their respective wives and children had even returned from overseas, they started working on analysing England.
And although they also had other duties to fulfil later on, they continued to do that for the next seven months. It didn’t start well, with England running up a commanding lead in no time at all in the first test at Emirates Airline Park, but the Boks had done their homework, they stuck to their guns and they came back to win the game.
SIMILARITIES BETWEEN NOW AND THEN
The Boks were playing together for the first time so it was understandable there were mistakes, and the early England lead in both Johannesburg and Bloemfontein, where the Boks also came from behind, was down to defensive mistakes. In those embryonic days there wasn’t time to mould the Bok defensive unit into the formidable and stingy thing it has become.
What is interesting, given how some people make England such overwhelming favourites for Saturday, is what you see if you take a look at the two teams that played in that series. The two locks who started in that series, RG Snyman and Franco Mostert, are now on the bench, otherwise the key combinations from then are still together. As in the same hooker, two thirds of the same front-row, the same No 8, the same flank and captain, the same halfback combination and the same midfield pairing.
That tells you two things - Erasmus pretty much got his best combination right straight away, and there has also been a lot of opportunity for growth. Which, of course, there has also been for England, who also have a similar team now to what they had then. There was talk that Jones was experimenting back then and they were under-strength but 11 of the team that started in Johannesburg, and lost, last June are back to start again in the World Cup final.
That includes the two Vunipola brothers. And the rest of the big names, with the only exception being Manu Tuilagi. It was Henry Slade who played outside centre in Johannesburg.
BOTH TEAMS HAVE GROWN SINCE THEN
You could argue that England have grown since then and I can recall writing after England squeezed home in a Twickenham clash last year that could have gone either way that they were the team in world rugby that had the most potential for growth. That was because John Mitchell had only just joined England as defence coach.
But the Boks have grown since then too, certainly psychologically. The point is that in terms of having self-belief against a team and knowledge that you can beat them, the Boks do have that when it comes to England. The count-out between the two nations since Erasmus took charge of the Boks is two wins each, but you need to look at the detail. In the third test of the series in South Africa, the game played in Cape Town, Erasmus was experimenting. He did not play his best team.
And the November test was played outside of the international window, and could still have gone either way. Indeed, the Boks dominated the first half of that game and were on the cusp of putting them away, and then should probably still have won it later on had referee Angus Gardner been brave enough to penalise Owen Farrell for his apparent no arms tackle on Andre Esterhuizen.
FARRELL IS THE MAN THE BOKS NEED TO SHUT DOWN
Talking of the England captain, he’s one of the key men the Boks have to shut down on Saturday. Jones would have known he was taking a risk when he retained last week’s backline formation, with George Ford at flyhalf and Farrell playing outside him, for this decisive game. The Boks pretty much poured through Ford’s channel last November.
But Jones would have opted for Farrell wearing the No 12 jersey on the basis of what he can do when it comes to setting up attacks and spotting space, something he is a genius at, and of course has kicking skills to go with his running skills. Jones would have felt that playing him and Ford together, like he did in South Africa last year, might just give his team the attacking edge, and with the formidable presence of Tuilagi outside Farrell, it is probably at the back that England have any kind of advantage, if they do have one.
When it comes to the forwards you wouldn’t say that. Yes, England were magnificent up front against New Zealand last week but if they destroy the Bok pack that would be the first time they’ve done that in four starts. The trend has been for the South Africans to have the edge in that area. And through the six-two split between forwards and backs on the bench, it does increase the chances of the Boks sustaining their brutally physical approach over 80 minutes. And we all know how important that area of the game is in determining how a match will turn out, particularly in a World Cup final.
OF COURSE BOKS WILL BRING MORE THAN THEY DID AGAINST WALES
The Boks will have to bring more to their game than they did against Wales, but they know that and they intend that. Which doesn’t mean they are suddenly going to turn into New Zealand or Japan in terms of attacking play. To be brutally honest, while there’s plenty of raw pace and power out wide, and the undeniable X-factor of Cheslin Kolbe and Willie le Roux, if he finds form, the process of uplifting the core skills of South African backs is still a work in progress. They can’t be Japan, or New Zealand or Australia for that matter, just yet.
The primary objective is to win the game, for what it does for the people back home and what it will do for the sport in South Africa, and to those who quibble with the thought that the Boks might just win this game by shutting England down, look at the following facts: South Africa have won two Rugby World Cups, but have yet to score a try across two finals, in both the preceding games the score attained to win was 15 points.
RASSIE IS MOST EMPHATICALLY NOT STEPPING ASIDE
Did South Africans not celebrate those two wins like there was no tomorrow? Did those two wins not uplift the nation? They did. Erasmus is in the rare position of being a Bok coach who will continue after the World Cup - don’t believe the stories that suggest otherwise, if he changes his title to director of rugby he’s still effectively the coach - and he’s made it clear that the Boks are far from the finished product.
The game they are playing now is not what he envisages them playing going forward. They will move towards something more wholesome and all-embracing in the next four-year cycle, and if you think back to the two Rugby Championship campaigns Erasmus has presided over, you will note the rugby played there was very different to what they’ve played in this tournament.
The England coach had a two-year-and-a bit-year start on Erasmus when it came to preparing and building towards Saturday, and that needs to be kept in mind if the Boks lose. But imagine if the Boks win at this point when the coach feels he’s only part of the way down the road to where he wants to be? There’s a lot to be gained by the Boks on Saturday, regardless of how they do it.
TEAMS
South Africa: Willie le Roux, Cheslin Kolbe, Lukhanyo Am, Damian de Allende, Makazole Mapimpi, Handre Pollard, Faf de Klerk, Duane Vermeulen, Pieter-Steph du Toit, Siya Kolisi (captain), Lood de Jager, Eben Etzebeth, Frans Malherbe, Bongi Mbonambi, Tendai Mtawarira. Replacements: Malcolm Marx, Steven Kitshoff, Vincent Koch, RG Snyman, Franco Mostert, Francois Louw, Herschel Jantjies, Frans Steyn.
England: Elliot Daly, Anthony Watson, Manu Tuilagi, Owen Farrell (captain), Jonny May, George Ford, Ben Youngs, Billy Vunipola, Sam Underhill, Tom Curry, Courtney Lawes, Maro Itoje, Kyle Sinckler, Jamie George, Mako Vunipola. Replacements: Luke Cowan-Dickie, Joe Marler, Dan Cole, George Kruis, Mark Wilson, Ben Spencer, Henry Slade, Jonathan Joseph.
Referee: Jerome Garces (France)
Kick-off: 11am South African time.
Prediction: South Africa by 5