Ireland coach Andy Farrell perfectly summed up in his post-match television interview in Sydney the underlying theme for the teams that made their first foray into the new Nations Championship at the weekend - “Everyone’s got an eye on what is coming up.”
Meaning where he will be with his team next September. The next Rugby World Cup to be hosted in Australia is starting to accelerate up the track towards us, and while there was some emphasis on the log points that came with the first-round results in the Championship, the main story is the one that revolves around how everyone is shaping with the World Cup in mind.
And that main story has a pretty basic line to it, and it would go “We all need to find a way to catch South Africa”. When Farrell was speaking, it was a few hours before the world champion and World Rugby No 1-ranked Springboks produced the statement performance of the weekend against England. Seven tries to three, and with a team way below full strength, there was surely no argument that the Boks’ was the performance of the round.
BOKS AND ENGLAND ARE CHALK AND CHEESE
The difference in the outlook for the Boks right now and the England team they beat is chalk and cheese. Having presided over five consecutive defeats, England coach Steve Borthwick’s position is now under serious threat. Ellis Park is one heck of a place to have to go to defend your position, and the result was predictable, even if England were a bit unlucky in the end to lose by as much as they did.
They did have their moments during the game, but it is an indication of how far England have slipped since their heady moments of last November, when, after the big win over New Zealand, the mood of England was one of “Let’s take on the Boks”, that after the Ellis Park game Borthwick was clinging to the hope he felt had been provided by the second-quarter fightback.
The first round of the #NationsChampionship was box office 🍿 pic.twitter.com/JT9uCwtM9Y
— SuperSport Rugby (@SSRugby) July 5, 2026
His captain on the day, Jamie George, echoed a similar theme, saying that he felt his team had the Boks flustered during that period. As if that was a huge positive to take from a game where his team lost by 24 points, and his counterpart Pieter-Steph du Toit quickly poured cold water on that theory when he spoke of the Boks correcting what went wrong during that period as if it was just another day at the office for his team.
In contrast to England, who do have young players coming through but are surely unsure now of who should be guiding them forward, and Borthwick should be criticised for his lack of ambition in keeping Henry Pollock, one player who could have changed the narrative, on the bench until the game was lost, the Boks are as organised and settled as ever.
Which is quite something to say given they are eight locks down and went into the Ellis Park cauldron missing nearly half their first-choice team (remember in addition to the missing Siya Kolisi and Eben Etzebeth, who withdrew at the 11th hour, there are also long-term absentees like Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu).
DRIVE TO REINVENT EVIDENT IN MOST GAMES
England need to reinvent themselves if they want to catch the Boks, and there were signs of reinvention designed to find a way to shorten the gap at the top that the South Africans currently have, and it is a wide one, across most of the other games. It is debatable whether it will work or not, but the Boks’ arch-rivals, and imminent opponents in the Greatest Rivalry Series, the All Blacks, were arguably the team with the most changed-up approach.
The Kiwis were appalling when it came to dealing with the Boks’ contestable kicking game under the coaching of Scott Robertson, and on the evidence of their narrow win over a depleted France team in Christchurch, under new coach Dave Rennie their approach might be to try and shy away from contestables altogether by honing up their ball-in-hand attacking game.
They came close to losing the game, but judging from what was said afterwards by key players in the All Black unit, Cam Roigard, the excellent scrumhalf, and the team leader Ardie Savea, this appears to be a time when the All Blacks are prepared to risk in order to gain. Ultimately, their performance was exactly what one Kiwi journalist described it as, “clunky”, but then it was Rennie’s first game in charge.
South Africans will remember that when the Boks first started to internalise the different dynamic brought by attack coach Tony Brown they also took a while to adapt. So given it was the first day at the office under their new boss, the All Black performance was passable even if it didn’t shoot the lights out, with the biggest takeaway being Rennie’s quite radical shift away from what his predecessor was working on.
AUSTRALIA ARE DEFINITELY GROWING AS A TEAM
In the other game played in the Antipodes, next year’s World Cup hosts would be right if they felt hard done by following a last-gasp defeat to Ireland in a game they dominated for much of the way. Ireland’s attack was impressive and the try scored by Jamison Gibson-Park, even if the Aussie commentators were so convinced the last pass was forward, was just sublime and a perfect example of Irish attacking organisation.
Wallaby coach Joe Schmidt, who just doesn’t seem to go away as he keeps extending his tenure, and that’s a good thing for Australian rugby, was in experimental mood going into the game and a lot of what he tried worked, with the linking between forwards and backs being impressive and seen as a way to get around the Boks’ rush defence.
Not that the Aussies have to think too hard about that, as they had more success than anyone else in 2025 when it came to crossing the Bok line, most of if of course concertinaed into the last 50 minutes at Ellis Park, but they were also a threat in the damp of Cape Town a week later. The Wallabies didn’t have the depth to sustain the renaissance that started last year towards the end of their series against the British and Irish Lions, and were out on their feet by the end of their November tour, but in the time since Schmidt took over from Eddie Jones they have grown as a team.
SCOTLAND TAKE SOME CONFIDENCE TO LOFTUS
Talking of Jones, his Japan team scored a surprisingly easy win over Italy in Tokyo, not that they will be seen as chasing the Boks. But the team that the Boks face next provided the best away performance of the weekend, Scotland, with their attacking game again coming to the fore, as it did against England and France in the Guinness Six Nations, in Argentina.
There is talk of Finn Russell being back in tow when they face the world champions at Loftus on Saturday but even if he isn’t, they will be starting with plenty of confidence against a team they have not faced on their home patch for quite a while. The Boks will be strong favourites, but let’s not forget Scotland’s growing reputation for being giant killers.
Nations Championship first round results
New Zealand 34 France 32
Japan 27 Italy 10
Australia 31 Ireland 33
Fiji 24 Wales 39
South Africa 45 England 21
Argentina 38 Scotland 47