While Springbok fans may be salivating at the hope of a clean sweep during the team’s opening Castle Lager Rugby Championship games in Australia, it is worth a reminder that over the years - and even under the coaching duo of Rassie Erasmus and Jacques Nienaber - results have been mixed, and that wins down under are hardly ever guaranteed.
Back-to-back World Cup wins have shown the Boks to be the masters of tournament rugby, but in the Rugby Championship it has often been the opposite. The Boks have handily beaten Australia and Argentina in South Africa, and shared the spoils with New Zealand at times, but when it comes to playing away, their record is nowhere near as good.
If you have to look at the modern era - the 29 times the teams have played since 1995 has seen the Wallabies win 24 times, four times for the Boks and one draw.
Every Springbok coach has struggled with beating Australia in Australia, even as the Wallabies have struggled over the years. Whether it is travel, the sometimes lengthy trickery the Wallabies get away with or the Boks’ own failings, it has not been a good place to tour over the years.
Under Erasmus, the Boks have won once - at the re-opening of the Sydney Football Stadium in 2022, where a young winger named Canan Moodie jumped into the hearts of Bok fans by taking an up and under on debut and scoring a brilliant try on debut.
But the Boks narrowly lost in 2018 under Erasmus in Brisbane, lost twice in 2021 in the quarantine enforced Rugby Championships and then again in the game at the Adelaide oval in 2022 - a game made famous by the Oscar dive by scrumhalf Nic White that cost Faf de Klerk a yellow card (remember that?) and Marike Koroibete’s illegal tackle on a diving Makazole Mapimpi to cost the Boks a try that should have been.
A week later the Boks won in Sydney, and the teams only played once - in South Africa - in 2023, so it would be easy to reckon the Boks will be more than a formidable opponent for the Wallabies in the next few weeks.
After all, the Wallabies were in disarray under Eddie Jones last season, and have started to regroup under Joe Schmidt and work their way towards hosting both the British and Irish Lions next year and the Rugby World Cup in 2027.
They are very much a work in progress and while Schmidt has made all the right noises, they weren’t as convincing against a weak Welsh touring team as they would have liked.
BOKS SHOULD BE FAVOURITES
So the Boks, who shared an epic series with Ireland and dispatched both Wales and Portugal easily in their first four internationals, should be going in as favourites.
They are defending World Cup holders and are expected to field a very strong line-up. But they are also a team in transition, moving towards a new expansive game plan under new attack coach Tony Brown.
And the Wallabies, under Schmidt, will use every trick in the book to disrupt the Boks’ momentum, and their ability to try and dominate the game.
If history is any guide, they do this pretty well at times, and have got the rub of the green at home.
But this weight of history is there to be broken. And as much as the Boks are transitioning, they need good victories away from home to take them from being a tournament team to a world class side that dominates between World Cups.
That has always been something that has evaded them, and is a big focus for the current coaching team.
That all starts in Australia in 10 days time. The Boks fly out Wednesday and will have more than enough time to acclimatise to Brisbane’s tropical weather, and the task at hand.
As much as Ireland were their biggest test outside the World Cup, this is an uncomfortable, necessary task to beat a foe that for some reason, has come out on top more than the Boks would have liked, finding ways to counter the physical dominance and exploiting their weaknesses, often by out-thinking the Boks on the field.
If winning the Rugby Championship is the goal, the Boks can do worse than start off on a high note, kill a few demons on the way and prove to themselves they can win away from home - the same venue they will defend their Webb Ellis trophy in a few years’ time.
Which makes this tour a chance to rewrite history and lay down a marker.
Time will tell if the Boks can do both.
Springboks’ Rugby Championship fixtures in Australia
10 August v Wallabies in Brisbane - Kick off: 6:45am
17 August v Wallabies in Perth - Kick off: 11:45am