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PREVIEW: Boks set to turn Championship into dead rubber

football06 September 2024 04:45| © SuperSport
By:Gavin Rich
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Springboks © Getty Images

The narrative that came out of the All-Black selection for Saturday’s Castle Lager Rugby Championship clash with the Springboks from coach Scott Robertson and the Kiwi media was that the changes will prevent the hosts from repeating their late comeback.

“We won’t let them off the hook this time,” appears to be the prevailing feeling ahead of Saturday’s game at DHL Stadium in Cape Town. But this time it might be harder for them to get their opponents onto the hook.
After what happened last week, it is understandable that New Zealanders should be so focused on preventing another late surge from the Boks.

They didn’t go six/two between forwards and backs on the bench, but Robertson did make special mention of the experience added to the impact squad by his decision to leave fullback Beauden Barrett and scrumhalf TJ Perenara out of the starting team.

The Kiwis are clearly braced for a late onslaught from the Boks, like the one that saw the hosts overturn a 10-point deficit at Emirates Airlines Park with that many minutes remaining and end with a four-point win.

Or at least they were when they were talking. The problem is that they were talking two hours before the Boks named their team in what was an interesting Thursday of selection announcements.

If you were to ask them now, would they be saying the same things? They’d probably have taken poison that Bok coach Rassie Erasmus would continue with his policy of going six/two on the bench. After all, why change what has been working?

But Erasmus is invariably a step ahead and did not stick with the anticipated script, and he also arguably may have surprised with a starting team selection that was a departure from the trend since the end of the Ireland series of featuring experimental elements to it.

If you consider that Willie le Roux did come onto the field relatively early in the game for Damian Willemse, who like Kurt-Lee Arendse, Faf de Klerk and Franco Mostert is currently injured, while Duane Vermuelen has retired, Erasmus has gravitated back towards his selection for the World Cup final.

The unambiguous message from that, and he did say it in the team announcement press conference, is that this is a game the Boks desperately want to win to put the Championship race to bed.

The process of building towards the 2027 Rugby World Cup can resume after this, and may even be allowed to become more aggressive if the rest of the competition is turned into a dead rubber. 

Argentina should be respected, but the reality is that the only remaining really tough game this year after Saturday is the one against England at Twickenham in November.

Win with a bonus point and the Boks have nothing to lose in the matches home and away against the Pumas. Even without a bonus point it would take something ridiculously freaky to happen for them to be caught.

Erasmus is right when he says that the presence of Pieter-Steph du Toit in the Bok pack means that the hosts effectively do still have a Bomb Squad even though they have reduced the number of forwards from six to five. That’s because Du Toit does have the engine to go a full 80 minutes at full tilt and he will swop positions later in the game when Kwagga Smith comes on.

DON’T INTEND TO BE CHASING THIS TIME

What the selections says though is that the Boks don’t want to be in a position to be chasing the game this time. They want to get in early rather than let the All Blacks dictate terms in the first quarter like they did at Ellis Park a week ago and for that matter at that stadium the previous time they played there two years prior to that.

The recipe that they will be turning to is the one that they employed at Twickenham in the World Cup warmup game last September.

And for that matter in Nelspruit in 2022, as well as the first part of the World Cup final before the red card to Sam Cane gave every Kiwi player an extra arm and a leg.

There was a lot of talk about how much the All Blacks dominated the game for the first hour in Johannesburg but if you are referencing physical ascendancy, that might be perception rather than reality.

Certainly, from the vantage point of the Ellis Park press box, it looked like the longer the game lasted, and long before the decisive last 10 minutes, it was in fact the Boks who were systematically taking physical control of the game. 

Their problem was just that they weren’t efficient and clinical enough and made too many mistakes.

The Kiwis were energised when the Boks gifted them that early second half intercept try scored by Jordie Barrett.

If that hadn’t happened, the South Africans might well have drawn away and won comfortably.

The return of the man with the Bjorn Borg temperament (the serial 1970s Wimbledon winner was known as Ice Borg for a reason), Handre Pollard, at flyhalf suggests this is a game where clinical efficiency allied to forward power rather than flash will be the emphasis. 

Or perhaps to be more accurate, the flash can come later, with what the Boks got right in the last minutes in Johannesburg being applied from the outset this time and the adventure following after the platform has been laid.

SA NOT LACKING ON THE BENCH

While the All Blacks have indeed made their bench more experienced with their selection, the presence of Lukhanyo Am and the utility value of Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu and even Pollard, who can shift to centre, means the Boks can match both in experience and in playing class what the Kiwis might throw at them late in the game. 

And the Boks still have a strong forward group coming onto the field.

Willie le Roux, who should aid the attacking game by dovetailing the first receiver role with Pollard, has played against and beaten the All Blacks often enough to be trusted as a member of a back three that might just have a better balance to it with the addition of Canan Moodie, who has the height to present a thorn to the New Zealand aerial attack. 

Cheslin Kolbe doesn’t have physical elevation, but he has phenomenal athleticism and pound for pound strength and invariably manages to get himself up there.

Eben Etzebeth starts this week rather than play off the bench, and that leaves just Malcolm Marx not being in the starting unit as an anomaly to the suggestion that the Bok team has been selected with the purpose of avoiding having to chase the game this time. 

It looks like a team selected with one purpose in mind, and that is to win and wrap up the Championship. The smart money should be on them achieving that objective without the reserves having quite the same relevance that they had a week ago.

SOUTH AFRICA: Willie le Roux, Canan Moodie, Jesse Kriel, Damian de Allende, Cheslin Kolbe, Handre Pollard, Grant Williams, Jasper Wiese, Pieter-Steph du Toit, Siya Kolisi (captain), Ruan Nortje, Eben Etzebeth, Frans Malherbe, Bongi Mbonambi, Ox Nche. Replacements: Malcolm Marx, Gerhard Steenekamp, Vincent Koch, Kwagga Smith, Elrigh Louw, Jaden Hendrikse, Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, Lukhanyo Am.

NEW ZEALAND: Will Jordan, Sevu Reece, Rieko Ioane, Jordie Barrett, Mark Tele’a, Damian McKenzie, Ardie Savea, Sam Cane, Wallace Sititi, Tupuo Vaa’i, Scott Barrett (captain), Tyrel Lomax, Codie Taylor, Tamaiti Williams. Replacements: Osafo Aumua, Ofa Tu’ungafasi, Fletcher Newell, Sam Darry, Luke Jacobson, TJ Perenara, Anton Lienert-Brown, Beauden Barrett.

REFEREE: Matthew Carley (RFU)

KICK-OFF: 17:00

PREDICTION: Boks to win by 10

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