Evolution. The word that can be used to describe so much of the narrative that dominated the autumn series of autumn internationals in the northern hemisphere. Indeed, maybe even this entire first post-World Cup year.
The wily coaches who evolve to meet new challenges thrown at them are arguably one of the reasons that the rugby law makers are continually making changes. The officials try to be pro-active, they try to make changes to create a different picture to the one that is manipulated by the latest coaching trend. But they fail. The coaches are always too clever.
Before the autumn series started the law makers were unwittingly sneaky. They ushered in variations, most significantly the one around escort runners for the ball catcher, that were announced so late that it caught the coaches unawares. It was a talking point at the beginning of November, only a matter of weeks ago. While the law remains an ass, already there are signs of adaptation.
MAC WAS MISUNDERSTOOD BUT AHEAD OF HIS TIME
People are resistant to change, and often evolution happens that many of even the rugby cognoscenti don’t understand. When the late Ian McIntosh coached Natal to that province’s first Currie Cup title in 1990 he employed a strategy that was coined ‘direct rugby’.
It involved the flyhalf lining up much closer to the gainline than used to be the case and inside centres became auxiliary flankers as, to use the parlance of the time, the ball was crashed up, with the objective of either breaching or setting up a loose scrum on the gainline becoming all important.
There were many detractors of the style in the so-called running rugby province, but the criticism was stifled when Mac’s team won the Currie Cup for the first time in 100 years. The following year though, which happened to be my first full one as a rugby writer, Natal struggled. They dropped from winners to being second last in the A Section.
Along the way the detractors came out of the woodwork, particularly after the team had suffered a 62-6 humiliation to Northern Transvaal in a Lion Cup final at Loftus. I understood Mac’s game, and supported it. But other older hacks, and most notably many ex-players who had become critics, didn’t. Mac was under pressure.
At a training session on the Monday before a Currie Cup game against Northern Transvaal at the same Loftus venue that his team had been humbled a fortnight earlier, Mac was particularly pleased to see me.
He’d invited an Australian coach who was visiting Durban to come and put a message across to his players, to reinforce direct rugby to the players through a different voice to his own, and he hoped I would in turn put that message out to the readers of the Natal Mercury.
The Aussie coach was well versed in ‘direct rugby’. He’d been employing it at New South Wales for a few years. Aspects of it had been introduced from rugby league.
So he was a bit ahead of the evolutionary curve in that respect. He gave Mac and his players a few extra attacking variations. Direct rugby did not have to be boring and always crash-bash.
Sure enough I was transfixed as the following Saturday I watched Natal implement some of the new variations. They turned a 62-6 defeat into a win by about 15 points. By the way, the name of that Aussie coach was Rod MacQueen. He guided the Wallabies to their second Rugby World Cup title eight years later.
BOKS TOOK A LONG TIME TO CATCH UP
These days everybody plays direct rugby. Mac was ahead of his time, and the Aussies were ahead of him. It was maybe why they won two World Cups in the 1990s. They were ahead of the evolutionary curve.
South Africa, because of the years of isolation, were for a long time way behind the evolutionary curve. McIntosh’s game wasn’t fully understood by all his players when he was Bok coach until it was too late, though SA did profit from it as much of Mac’s game was carried through by Francois Pienaar and his fellow players when Kitch Christie coached them to World Cup glory in 1995.
The switch to direct rugby wasn’t the last time rugby evolved. It continues to do so, and teams have to evolve within themselves and their own game too. The successful coaches are the ones that remain ahead of the curve, the ones that aren’t successful are the ones that are reactive rather than proactive.
KIWIS HAVE RIGHT ATTITUDE TO ‘BOMB SQUAD’
The other talking point in the early days of this past autumn series was once again the so-called Bok ‘bomb squad’. When the South Africans shifted a gear to beat Scotland, there was some quite predictable criticism of it. Bok coach Rassie Erasmus had gone quite radical that day, with a seven/one split between forwards and backs, but he explained why he’d done it - there was just a six day turnaround between that game and the one against England.
Erasmus had set up England to expect at the very least the six/two split that was the make-up of the usual bomb squad. Instead he surprised them by going five/three. Not that those who criticised him the previous week necessarily even picked it up. Erasmus was this time thinking ahead of his own curve - he needed more backs to blunt the possible impact of fatigue caused by what he expected to be a game dominated by kick and chase.
Erasmus’ selection for Twickenham gave credence to the view that, were World Rugby to reduce the size of the bench, he’d be the first to evolve with the change. The Boks aren’t tied to their bomb squad for success, at least not while Rassie is involved. He will find a way, as he does.
There was something to be gleaned from how different nations, teams and media have reacted to the Bok bomb squad, for it tells its own story. By the end of the international year, while others whinged and stayed static, the All Blacks were on the up, and one of the constant conversation pieces on the Kiwi rugby show The Breakdown was how New Zealand was developing its depth.
Former All Black Jeff Wilson said he didn’t want to call the All Black bench a bomb squad, for that he said belonged to another team, but it was clear what he meant. It wasn’t so much the configuration of the All Black bench that Wilson was referring to, but the massive impact that was being developed.
The Kiwis had learnt from their experience in South Africa a few months ago, and they haven’t wasted time in evolving. Which was also the case after 2009, when the Boks won three games in succession against the All Blacks en route to that year’s Tri-Nations title.
The All Black coach Graham Henry took time out to study what had worked for the Boks, and the following year there was a focussed attempt across all the Kiwi Super Rugby franchises to improve aspects of their forward play and tactical game.
The result of that focus was that in the space of a year the All Blacks reversed the results of 2009 and off that platform they won the 2011 World Cup. The All Blacks evolved their game. They did that because they had suffered a rare humiliation.
EVEN WINNERS NEED TO EVOLVE
But it shouldn’t require defeat to inspire innovation and evolution. The Boks are double RWC champions but Erasmus was clever enough to know that doing the same thing that brought that success would eventually enable the other nations to catch up.
So in his attempt to stay ahead of the evolutionary curve, in came a new attack coach in Tony Brown, and the innovation that has followed is almost too numerous to list.
The upshot is that the Boks have so many more threats across the park, and ways to win, than they had before. And the chilling reality for the other nations is that the Boks are nowhere near where they want to be.
Part of the reason for that is because Erasmus has seen the need to evolve in a team selection sense too. Just as there’s evolution of game plan, so there is the evolution of the team through selection, and on that score Erasmus is doing what others should follow - but either can’t or won’t.
With so many double World Cup winners in his squad, Erasmus had, with the help of Jacques Nienaber and others who played a guiding role in those first two World Cup triumphs, created a strong platform. It makes being brave in selection easier, and the Boks are streets ahead of most of the Home Union nations when it comes to preparing for the next World Cup in 2027.
ENGLAND ARE DIAMETRIC OPPOSITE TO RASSIE
Compare Erasmus’ selection policy with that of England’s Steve Borthwick. Some would argue that Borthwick needed to keep the same team he’d played the first three games of the autumn series for the final game against Japan because he’d lost the first three and needed the win.
But England were playing against Japan, for goodness sake. Not the Japan of the 2019 World Cup, but the current struggling Japan. And the game was at England’s headquarters.
Ireland coach Andy Farrell did introduce the youthful Sam Pendergast for his team’s most recent game, but it was against Fiji, where there’s much less element of risk. Erasmus, when he introduced the South African version of Pendergast, Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, did it after the player had just had a fleeting taste of international rugby as a reserve and it was in a series between the No 1 and No 2 teams in the world.
Yes, Feinberg-Mngomezulu was only on the bench in those two games, but you never know when a flyhalf or fullback might go down early, in which case Feinberg-Mngomezulu would have to play almost an entire game. Which he did end up doing in Durban when fullback Willie le Roux was helped off not long after the game had kicked off.
We wondered when he chose Feinberg-Mngomezulu as his starting flyhalf in Australia if he would be prepared to do that against the All Blacks. He did. At least in the first of the two games against them. He also gambled on Ben-Jason Dixon in that Johannesburg game and Pieter-Steph du Toit was selected to start at No 4 lock.
EDDIE MIGHT HAVE BEEN ONTO SOMETHING
Wallaby coach Joe Schmidt has chosen 18 debutants this year, and it suggests that Eddie Jones might have been onto something when he was coach and made wholesale changes for what became a disastrous World Cup for Australian rugby. The Aussies have to do that, they have to chance their arm and look ahead in an attempt to grow, they are almost in a situation where they have nothing to lose.
The Boks aren’t in that situation, yet Erasmus has been way ahead of the curve when it comes to evolving his resources towards the end goal of 2027, and there are always small innovations that we might miss that may become significant.
Here’s one - it wasn’t the first time it happened, but when Handre Pollard came on in Cardiff at the weekend it wasn’t for flyhalf Jordan Hendrikse. He slotted in alongside Hendrikse at inside centre, where apparently he has trained a lot this season.
The Boks have two excellent No 12s in Damian de Allende and Andre Esterhuizen, and actually three because that may well be the injured Damian de Allende’s best position, but Erasmus is looking ahead towards what many others would regard as hitherto unforeseen circumstances.
AN ECCENTRIC GENIUS
The Bok depth has become the envy of the world, but Erasmus has grown that depth. If he didn’t give the players who have come through opportunities, the Boks might well have gone through this season unbeaten, but they’d be in danger of having a team that had gone over the summit by the time the next World Cup arrives.
The Bok record was still an excellent one, they remain in pole position on the rankings, and they have so many bases covered.
When the Boks returned to international rugby after isolation in 1992 the Boks were behind the evolutionary curve. Now they are ahead of it, and it is mainly down to one man - Rassie Erasmus. Like many eccentrics, not everyone understands him. Like many eccentrics, he’s also a genius.