Okay so most South Africans have been magnanimous and honest enough to do what Springbok centre Jesse Kriel exhorted us to do in the aftermath of what most of his team’s are referring to as “the Ellis Park nightmare”. The Wallabies have been given credit and there is widespread acknowledgement they are a much improved team.
Yet the game at Emirates Airlines Park was also an easy one to write and talk about when it came to pinpointing why the Boks, after beating the Wallabies comfortably twice in Australia last year with effectively second string teams, ended up losing by 16 points at a venue where they hadn’t lost to those opponents in 63 years.
It didn’t require a degree in rugby rocket science to figure out that the Boks had overplayed and this was an occasion when what the coaches and players said in the media conferences afterwards coincided with most of what was written. And it wasn’t just Bok coach Rassie Erasmus either, but his opposite number in the Australian dugout too.
Joe Schmidt said that he’d been in this game long enough to know that when a team gets off to a rollicking start and scoring appears to become too easy it can often come back to bite you. Put simply, you get seduced by the momentum, and to employ a useful cricketing analogy, you start thinking that you can stop playing in the V and you can start reverse sweeping just about every ball.
THEY PUT AWAY WHAT HAD WORKED
Which the Boks did in the sense that they put away the tried and trusted early tactic of setting up through winning the aerial contest. For the first 20 minutes they were brilliant, for the next 20 they were good, but then all the frenetic running caught up with them in the second half and they became awful.
Shmidt had been there in a previous visit to Johannesburg as coach of Ireland in 2016. The Boks were dominated by his team in the first half of that game, but then became loose, ran out of puff, and once the South Africans were back in the game there was only one team in it.
A more recent example of what happened this past weekend from the Erasmus era was the Bok win over the All Blacks in Wellington in 2018. The Kiwis were running riot early on, scored early tries, and went ahead 14-0.
Having beaten the Boks 57-0 in their previous game on New Zealand soil, the All Blacks then started to chase a big score, and their frenetic attempts to keep up the scoring momentum let the Boks back in in very similar fashion to the way the Wallabies were allowed in. You might remember Jordy Barrett’s gift try to Willie le Roux, there was also an intercept.
Suddenly the Boks were ahead, they had confidence and they were able to hold out for the victory. Afterwards though, when you looked at the stats of the game, you wondered how the South Africans had won. The New Zealanders dominated possession and territory, all the tackling had to be done by the Boks.
Which was pretty much the case for most of the game for the Wallabies in Johannesburg. Yes, the Australians deserved credit, but there was also no denying the home team’s culpability in the defeat. They conspired about themselves.
BRINGING BALANCE WILL HELP PASS THE DEPTH TEST
There are injuries this week that will make the Bok task of rebounding on Saturday more difficult, but then we’ve all praised Rassie for the way he has improved the Bok depth and this might be a good time to put it to the test. What went wrong in Johannesburg is easily fixable.
In short, the Boks just need to tighten up. They need to improve their game management, must back their kicking game more, and must mix up their attack more.
If you are arguably the best driving maul team in the world, don’t put away that avenue of attack. It was that rather bizarre oversight that contributed to the Boks making 13 entries into the opposition 22 in the game without getting reward. Admittedly the lineouts are a crucial area to work on, and it is a concern that this isn’t the first time this season we are saying that.
There were a few warning signs that flickered even before the momentum shifted in the first game, like Aphelele Fassi being caught out of position. He was saved on a few occasions by Edwill van der Merwe, who won’t be playing in the Cape Town game because of injury.
But we should also not forget how good the Boks were at the start of the game, how dominant they were. When people talk about the Joe Schmidt plan they are surely not factoring being 22-0 down as part of any plan. The Wallabies were out of it for long periods, you could see it in their body language when they stood behind the posts after conceding points.
And maybe what he experienced in that period, and his players experienced, is what helped Schmidt be so magnanimous in the post match presser. He spoke about his team being lucky. I am not suggesting he was being dishonest, but there may be a small part of him that was instinctively avoiding giving the Boks any extra motivation for the next game.
My feeling is that while the Wallabies have improved, the 17 point lead the Boks enjoyed at halftime might well be the difference between the teams. Saturday's was a freaky game. They often are at Ellis Park.
It's all over at Ellis Park. Well done to the @wallabies on the victory 🤝#Springboks #ForeverGreenForeverGold #RSAvAUS pic.twitter.com/3mMFgIxThc
— Springboks (@Springboks) August 16, 2025
OVER-CORRECTION MUST BE AVOIDED
A Bok game correction should see them home as winners in Cape Town. But what they mustn’t do is what some Bok teams and coaches of the past have done by throwing the baby out with the bath-water and over-correcting.
The so-called Tony-ball, meaning what attack coach Tony Brown has been working on, worked against Australia. After 20 minutes everyone was talking about his impact. And he himself apparently was frustrated that the team overplayed and was shouting instructions from the box to correct it.
When Harry Viljoen was Bok coach he started out with a strategy in a game in Argentina where the players were instructed not to kick the ball. By the end of his tenure, because the results had gone against him, he was setting up his team to play the most turgid, conservative game imaginable.
That has happened many times in Bok history, and it has often set our rugby back. Fortunately Erasmus is too clever for that, and what we should see at the DHL Stadium in a few days from now is a retention of the zippy rugby played in the first half at Emirates Airlines Park, just with more balance to it and more evidence of what we used to refer to as South African rugby’s traditional strengths.