What was much more confounding than the result of South Africa’s penultimate game in this Castle Lager Rugby Championship campaign was what came after it. Headlines like “Argentina keep the Championship alive”. Really? They have to win by a big score in Nelspruit to do that. What planet are you on?
The one bonus point garnered from the admittedly unexpected defeat to the Pumas at the weekend, coupled with limiting the winners to just the four points for the result, means that the Championship trophy is effectively coming to South Africa for the first time since 2019, and only the second time in the history of the tournament in its current guise.
The Pumas may have a chance of winning in Nelspruit, and the Mbombela Stadium game certainly has extra edge, with the Boks now under pressure to respond, even if only to satisfy their own high standards and the expectations of the rugby public. But with five points separating the teams on the log, meaning that the Pumas can only draw level and that would require them to deny the Boks even a solitary bonus point, it’s fanciful to suggest that Nelspruit won’t see the Bok inauguration as Championship champions to go with their World Cup champion status.
It’s even more fanciful if you fill in the other requirement for the Pumas - at the moment the points differential in favour of the Boks is 37 points so the Pumas are going to have to break a winning margin record against the world champions at a ground they normally do well on.
They did look momentarily capable of that in Santiago, as who scores 26 unanswered points against the Boks? And the time it took them to score those points was phenomenal and freakish, and in keeping with our pre-match assessment that the Pumas have become the French of circa 1970s/1980s, and the 1999 World Cup semifinal. In other words unpredictable and dangerous.
THE GAMBLE WASN’T THAT HUGE
But here’s the thing - if coach Rassie Erasmus had kept Handre Pollard on the field as a part of the midfield when he quite understandably gave Manie Libbok his first playing opportunity in ages, which does make the rusty edges to Libbok’s all-round game completely understandable, the Boks would still have won. And that would be the narrative this morning if Libbok had kicked it - the Boks conceded 26 points without reply and still won the game. That’s how much they’ve grown, would be what we’d have said.
The Boks didn’t win in Santiago, and as reigning double RWC winners there is understandable expectation that they should win every game. But the gamble that Erasmus took, and that even he admitted to afterwards, when he’d said his selection was always a risk for an away game in Argentina, wasn’t nearly as pronounced as is being made out.
They could afford to take risks against the Pumas. Which they did, and they lost, but they will still win the Championship. There aren’t really any ifs or buts to that, they’ve won it, and they’ve done it while increasing the depth by spreading the selection net like never before.
JUST NEED TO CHANNEL 2009
Yes, it was risky in terms of the result to make 10 changes for Santiago from the team that beat the All Blacks last time out. But the result became less relevant after two consecutive wins over the All Blacks in South Africa. And if you think that this defeat will be so relevant in the final wash-up to the Championship season, then think back to 2009.
That was the year the Boks completed their most dominant Tri-Nations campaign aside from 1998, when Nick Mallett’s team won all their games in what was then a four-game competition. They won five of their six games in 2009, with the one defeat being an unexpected one-sided loss to Australia in Brisbane in the penultimate game. Anyone else remember that game? Not many will, everyone just remembers that the Boks did the business the following weekend in Hamilton.
Which they should be expected to do on Saturday in Nelspruit. The pressure is now on the Boks, as it was on the All Blacks when they lost to Argentina in the first Rugby Championship clash of the season. But if you know Erasmus, he will probably welcome that. Just like he probably welcomed the situation they found themselves in when Libbok had to kick that penalty to win it. It is in the pressure situations that you learn about your team and players, and they learn about each other. Play 10 games in a row against Portugal and you learn nothing except that you are tier one and the other team is tier two.
THERE WERE LEARNINGS
Erasmus found out about Libbok then, and there were learnings, to use a much-used rugby expression, that he would have been mulling over as the Boks and the Pumas shared a chartered flight from Santiago to Nelspruit on Sunday.
He surely knows this himself, for he wouldn’t have won two RWC titles in succession if he was stupid enough not to know it, but one of those learnings is that you don’t entrust Libbok with the frontline goal-kicking duties.
He is right when he says the winning of the game should not have been up to Libbok. That should have been done and dusted long before that, given the South African possession and territorial dominance. But Erasmus will also know full well that if it was a World Cup final his team was playing, he’d have kept Pollard on the field at inside centre so he was there to nail the clutch kicks.
Which seemed almost inevitably likely to happen when the change was made. It just seemed the way the game was heading, it was always going to be close once the Pumas had fought their way back into the game. That Erasmus did not make that call was because he knew the reality - the Championship was effectively won in the two games against the All Blacks. He’d created room for himself to gamble.
Which everyone else surely also knows, maybe it just makes it more interesting to subscribe to the pretence that the Championship is still alive. If it is, it is only in a manner of speaking, and the Boks will have to properly spit the dummy, and the Pumas’ purple patch will have to be extended to much longer than it lasted in their home game.
FIRST QUARTER HOUR WAS SEDUCTIVE
So what other learnings were there from Santiago? Well, one of them might revolve around the first 15 minutes, which on the positive side showed us the pot of the gold that lies in wait if the Boks stick with the changes being bled in since Tony Brown joined the unit as attack coach. That was 15 minutes of almost perfect rugby from the Boks, but played at a furious tempo and intensity that was being executed in 36 degree heat.
Keeping that up was always going to be a big ask, and in that sense the Boks might have been too ambitious. And in many ways they fell victim to what the All Blacks did in Sydney earlier the same day - they got seduced by how easy it was early in the game and became sloppy. In the All Blacks case there was lax defence that saw them concede tries that initially didn’t seem likely to matter - but then suddenly did.
“I am always nervous when we start games too well.” Those words are from Erasmus in the post-match press conference. And when applied to the Santiago game up to that point, he wasn’t alone, and particularly not after what happened earlier in the day in Sydney, when the All Blacks were 21-0 up and then lost the plot and nearly lost the game.
A MOVIE WE’VE SEEN BEFORE
That’s a movie we’ve seen before, particularly from the All Blacks, and here cue the 2018 game when the Boks came back from 14-0 down to win against them in Wellington. When you have that good a start, it is natural to think it is going to be easy, and you chase a big winning margin rather than just focus on the end result.
For the Boks there might be a more recent example. The opening part of the first test against Ireland in Pretoria, where they scored almost from the kick-off and were dominating the game, only to relinquish that advantage later on and allow the Irish to come much closer to winning than they should have.
It may not be the case that the Boks ran themselves off their own feet in Santiago, but their frenetic start to the game played a role in them conceding four tries and 26 points in such quick succession in the period that followed that.
That the angle and dynamic envisaged by the introduction of Brown is correct was proven in that first quarter hour. The ability to play at that tempo and with that breadth of attacking option will make them so much more difficult than they already are for opposing teams to deal with. What we learned from the rest of the game is that the growing pains will continue for a while. They were there against the All Blacks, but the Boks won, so they were largely ignored.
They were there against the Pumas, and the Boks lost. But they still won the Championship, which they were always going to do, so while the word ‘gamble’ makes for good and interesting copy and maybe helps sell the next game, it’s really rubbish. The Championship was won in Cape Town two weeks ago, if there is any risk in anything the Boks do subsequent to that, it is minimal.
Weekend Castle Lager Rugby Championship results
Australia 28 New Zealand 31
Argentina 29 South Africa 28