The experienced and well travelled Barbarians coach Robbie Deans made no secret after his team’s defeat in Cape Town at the weekend of how much he admired how the Springboks have grown and how much ambition has been added to their game.
Thanks for a great game @Barbarian_FC, we hope you had a good time in South Africa, we'd love to see you back here soon 🤝#Springboks #ForeverGreenForeverGold #BARvRSA pic.twitter.com/U16INZYT3t
— Springboks (@Springboks) June 28, 2025
The former All Black assistant coach to John Mitchell, who in 2003 guided the Kiwis to two successive 50 pointers against the Boks and Australia, both games away from New Zealand, with what in terms of exhibitions of total rugby were as good as you can get, feels the Boks are on their way to realising the potential many overseas coaches were hoping might remain unrealised.
“There is no doubt the Boks are a lot more ambitious than they used to be,” said Deans, who coached Crusaders to several Super Rugby titles and was also head coach of the Wallabies for a time.
“They can play any situation now, they’ve developed the ability to do that. Historically they were one-dimensional, although very good at it, now they can play many different ways. They have got several players with a point of difference who can unlock a game.”
EVOLVING TO STAY AHEAD OF THE CURVE
The Boks have always had those players with a point of difference, or X-factor, but often their talents haven’t been played to by the team template. There was a time when the Bok wingers relied on intercepts to augment the staple, which was the rolling maul try. As Deans says, the Boks were good at it, but then as he also said during the buildup week to the Barbarians game, in rugby you need to constantly keep evolving to stay ahead of the curve.
The change actually started happening earlier in the Erasmus tenure, actually on the 2022 end of year tour when Jacques Nienaber was head coach and Erasmus was director of rugby. But the introduction of Deans’ countryman Tony Brown was a stroke of genius from Erasmus as he started out on the new World Cup cycle.
And while the Bok performance against the Barbarians was to my mind the execution of a perfect wet weather template, with so much revolving around attack of kicks and pressure, they did try enough ball in hand in the conditions to prompt Erasmus to ask them to wind their heads in a bit at halftime.
As Deans says, they have the ability to adapt their game for the conditions and the different circumstances they have to face down. And talking about playing the conditions, that was something that the Junior Springboks did perfectly in their Junior World Championship game against Australia in Italy, where they were faced with oppressive 37 degree heat and played an expansive game designed to run the Junior Wallabies off their feet, and succeeded in that mission.
Having watched the Junior Boks lose to the Aussies in Gqerberha in the Under-20 Rugby Championship a few months ago, it was like comparing chalk and cheese. Kevin Foote’s team were obviously much better conditioned, and their defence was better connected and more aggressive, with several of their 11 tries being the product of attacks off transition after Wallaby mistakes.
It was very much an example of the type of game that the Boks have started to execute probably ever since they started running the ball back to France when down to 14 men in their narrow loss in Marseille in 2022, with the juniors showing a willingness to run the ball from deep in their own territory when space presented itself and it was on to do so.
Yet that is not to say that the Bok traditional strengths weren’t very much to the fore and shown off through the driving maul and a dominant scrum performance that made it a no brainer for the Aussies to opt for a lineout whenever presented with a choice.
SETTING EXAMPLE THROUGH FLAGSHIP TEAM
So it was unsurprising then to hear Foote say in a Youtube clip afterwards that his team had drawn a lot from watching the senior Boks in action on television the day before.
“We watched the Boks and the guys were inspired by the way they played,” said Foote.
“I sat next to the players while they were watching and the way they were commentating on the game, the way they were using the same terminology as the Boks, was interesting. You can see they are getting an understanding of what it means to play Springbok rugby and they want to make sure we play with great intensity and physicality that shows off how much they love playing for their country.”
Erasmus was sometimes criticised when he was director of rugby for focusing too much on the Boks and not enough on the other arms of that job but setting an example through the flagship team is an important way of getting the message across.
It might be premature to write up the Junior Boks as potential world champions at age-group level and they have a tough game against England up next, but certainly there were elements of the 73-17 win that had the Bok style about it and also showed signs of an infusion of the culture of excellence that has been driven by Erasmus over the past seven years.