TALKING POINT: Kirwan's right - all the pressure is on Boks

Sometime a few decades ago when the Springboks were struggling and the All Blacks were soaring, the two teams met in a Tri-Nations test in Pretoria where the visitors were overwhelming favourites.

But you wouldn’t have thought that in a lift as it descended to the reception area in New Zealand’s team hotel a few hours before the game. I recall encountering an All Black management member who had a grave and nervous look on his face and was breathing deeply as he prepared to start the journey to the match venue.

“What’s the matter, why are you so nervous?”

“Mate, we are playing the Boks. No matter what anyone says, they are still the Boks, and they are always tough opponents.”

The All Blacks ended up winning with something to spare, as most pundits had predicted they would. But the memory of how nervous that Kiwi was all those years ago - I think it was the 2006 meeting in Pretoria following the 49-0 suffered by Jake White’s team in Brisbane - has given me an interesting perspective on the traditional rivalry.

CHASM NOT ALWAYS REFLECTED IN THE MATCH

The New Zealand management member was right. There have been exceptions, like 2016, where one of the teams has comprehensively won both or even all three games (2009) played between the sides. But there are a lot of instances that spring readily to mind where the chasm between the sides, be it the South Africans who were cast as the superior team or the Kiwis, was not reflected in the match.

Allister Coetzee’s second season in charge is actually a good example. Everyone remembers the 57-0 defeat suffered by the Boks in Albany. What many may have forgotten is that when the two teams met in the second game of 2017, at Newlands, the All Blacks had to dig incredibly deep to win by the narrowest of margins. They didn’t get the result, but the Boks looked like the better team.

Sport is rife with rivalries that bring out what we could refer to as a derby day atmosphere that levels the game. Liverpool’s years of drought coincided with the years of plenty for their arch-rivals Manchester United. But often in those seasons Liverpool pushed them hard, even at Old Trafford, and periodically won games they had no right to be winning. To some extent, we may have seen the reverse in the most recent Premier League season.

To my mind, 2022 is an example of the Boks and All Blacks levelling out when the South Africans should really have won both Rugby Championship games. The 26-10 win in Nelspruit was the measure of the Bok superiority.

But somehow in the week that followed the South Africans bottled it, perhaps not least because the management fiddled with selection, with among other changes the previous week’s Man of the Match Malcolm Marx dropping to the bench and Joseph Dweba starting.

With the Boks going on to win a second successive World Cup not much more than a year later, that loss will go down in the memory bank as a learning experience and part of the buildup to the main event.

And knowledge of how intense the South African rugby focus is on World Cups, it is understandable that there are some who feel this weekend’s game in Johannesburg carries less pressure to win than some other meetings between the traditional powerhouses of world rugby.

MASSIVE EXPECTATION ON THE HOSTS

Make no mistake, with the All Blacks already having lost once in the Championship to Argentina, there is merit in the argument that in terms of the drive for silverware, there is a far greater need for the visitors to win. The Boks can lose one of the two games to be played over the next two weekends on South African soil and still win the Championship.

The Kiwis probably have to win both if they want to retain their southern hemisphere crown.

But while acknowledging that a World Cup final does carry more gravitas, I beg to differ that there is less pressure on the Boks, and agree with former All Black legend John Kirwan, who said on the Breakdown magazine programme in New Zealand recently in looking ahead to this game that all the pressure is on the hosts.

It is. For the Boks have to start as overwhelming favourites. There’s a vast difference in where the two teams find themselves at present. The All Blacks have a new coach, effectively they’ve gone outside the group that was started by Graham Henry in 2004 for the first time in two decades. They’ve also lost key personnel to overseas clubs and to retirement. They are in a rebuilding phase.

The Boks are refreshing rather than rebuilding and they have a core of World Cup winners still playing for them, and still playing well. They effectively are led by the same coach who has been directing operations since 2018, and while the World Cup winning coach Jacques Nienaber has departed, the arrival of Tony Brown as attack coach in particular has arguably more than offset that loss.

RANKINGS REFLECT SA’S SUPERIORITY

Although there was only one point in it in the RWC final last October, the Boks are also the better team, as reflected by them being ranked No 1 and New Zealand ranked No 3. I’d say their margin of superiority is somewhere between the one point they won the final by and the 28 they won the World Cup warmup game at Twickenham by.

After the fanfare of becoming World Cup champions for a second successive time and the celebrations that went with it, there is a massive expectation on the Boks. One that wasn’t completely fulfilled by the Ireland series, where the early advantage was squandered and the No 2 ranked team was able to break even.

There may be some who will say it is only the World Cup that matters, and the building towards 2027 is what is all important, but is there a better way to establish a platform for that build than to use this first year of the World Cup cycle to underline their superiority.

While the Kiwis can never be written off, particularly on the fast and firm surfaces of the highveld that suit their style, the Boks are better than a record of five wins and five losses to go with a draw in 11 meetings between the teams since Erasmus took over would suggest.

LOSING A GAME WILL FEEL LIKE BACKWARD STEP

The Boks have won the World Cup four times but Covid prevented the previous first post-World Cup year, 2020, from being the exception to the rule that they falter in that first year after the completion of a winning cycle. In 1996, the year after the 1995 triumph, they lost their first ever home series to New Zealand and struggled in the Tri-Nations, and in 2008 it was a similar story of failure.

The need to be “champions away” was something emphasised by the 1995 Bok manager Morne du Plessis, but it wasn’t achieved by the 1996 team, where the baton was passed on from the ailing Kitch Christie to a new coach in Andre Markgraaff and ultimately a new captain in Gary Teichmann.

And being champions in the in-between years, which should be the aim, has not been achieved since then either. Not in a post World Cup winning year.

The Boks can win one of the two games and win the Championship, but given their current status and the growing global perception of them as a team on the edge of establishing hegemony, it would feel like a backward step if they don’t win both in Johannesburg this week and in Cape Town a week later.

It would suggest that this Bok team is not as good as we think it is and would equal the anticlimactic feeling that followed the Ireland series. That series was drawn, but given how eager the Boks were to sound out their superiority over Ireland, it felt like a defeat.