Not having Kiwis on the mind will help Boks in Brisbane

Inevitably as a game in Australia approaches there is an intensification of focus in the buildup week on why it is that for all their World Cup successes and impressive records against other teams, the Wallabies on home soil remain a bogey team for the Springboks.

While Australia have struggled in recent years and are no longer the force on the rugby field that they were when they won two Rugby World Cups in the 1990s and have regressed in both status and on the world rankings since they last played in a global final at Twickenham in 2015, their home soil stranglehold on the Boks has continued.

In the last nine meetings between the sides Down Under, the Boks have won just once, which was the last time the teams met on Australian soil in Sydney two years ago, a game that was played just a week after a rather chastening and unexpected defeat at the Adelaide Oval.

The Bok dominance on South African soil against the Wallabies is even more comprehensive, and the last time they played the reigning World Cup champions they won 43-12 in Pretoria with an experimental team. So it is not a case of the Wallabies being better than the Boks, as the respective World Cup rankings might indicate - SA is first, the Aussies a lowly ninth.

So it comes down to something else, and there may be some merit in the suggestion, often repeated in these weeks before an away Aussie game, that the Wallabies are just more wily and street-smart on their home fields than the Boks.

That though probably held for the years before Rassie Erasmus got involved in coaching the Boks. There’s no question about the Boks lacking street smarts, or substance in the cerebral department now. You don’t win two successive World Cups playing dumb rugby. So given that the win in Sydney 24 months ago was his only win in five starts as coach on Australian soil, it has to be something else.

NO DEFLECTED FOCUS THIS TIME

Cobus Reinach, who made his debut for the Boks in a 28-10 home win over the Wallabies in Cape Town in 2014, might have the key as to why there is this perplexing anomaly when it comes to Bok/Wallaby battles.

A decade ago, Cobus Reinach made his #Springboks debut against the Wallabies, and he had some words of advice for Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu - more here: https://t.co/5pESiTWq6y 👊#ForeverGreenForeverGold pic.twitter.com/iMs4xHbWNT

— Springboks (@Springboks) August 7, 2024

“Sometimes in the old days, or in recent years, we would look past Australia because had a game against New Zealand coming up next and we were maybe a bit too focused on that and didn’t prepare as well for the Aussies,” said Reinach, who will start at scrumhalf in the Castle Lager Rugby Championship opener at the Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane.

“We maybe didn’t prepare as well for the Aussies as we knew there was more to come after that. We don’t do that anymore. We now focus just on the here and now and what we need to do to get the win in the next match. And we focus purely on the performance that we know we need for it to be worthy of our people.”

The two games in the Covid impacted Rugby Championship in 2021 might have been a case in point. The Boks lost narrowly in successive weeks and were written off but stood up in the final games against an All Black team that was highly rated, winning the last game of the Championship after being unlucky not to win the first meeting with the Kiwis.

Erasmus’ first year in charge is an even better example - the coach selected a slightly weakened team so that he’d have a fresh combination facing the All Blacks in Wellington a week later. It backfired in the sense that the Boks lost that 2018 game 23-18 at Brisbane’s Lang Park, but it arguably worked in that a week later the Boks experienced a breakthrough moment with a rare win on New Zealand soil. Both the coaches and the players saw that epic win over the All Blacks as a seminal moment in the development of the team that won the World Cup the following year.

WARY OF WALLABY DESPERATION

It certainly gave them confidence, and perhaps it was a loss of confidence as much as complacency that cost the Boks in Adelaide a year later. That was a game that did not come in the buildup to a showdown with New Zealand - the All Blacks had already come to South Africa for two games, with the second of them being the deflating defeat in Johannesburg that counter-balanced the excellent win in Nelspruit the week before.

Confidence is something the Boks should have plenty of after winning a successive World Cup, but Reinach doesn’t believe that will lead to any complacency against the Wallabies. And the reason for that is that many of the South African players have their own strong recollections of what desperation can do, as it arguably did on that turnaround day in Wellington six years ago.

“Australia are low in the rankings but there was a time when we weren’t that good in the rankings and things weren’t that positive,” said the scrumhalf.

“That made us more and more desperate every time and we know that is where the Australians are now. They will be desperate to win. You can’t know exactly how desperate and how an opposing team will pitch but it is important for us to be prepared for whatever is thrown at us and we have done our homework on the Wallabies and know where their strengths and weaknesses lie.”