The statement win to ice the cake at the end of the Springboks’ victorious southern hemisphere international campaign was not forthcoming but the narrow defeat in a bizarre but memorable match in Perth would have confirmed what coach Rassie Erasmus knew already.
Make no mistake, the Wallabies were full value for their 42-38 win as they made their own statement - which is that they should not be trifled with when New Zealand play them in what will be an important Pool game at the Rugby World Cup they will be hosting this time next year.
Yes, the Boks had made 13 changes and it was in some ways not even a B team, but it was the second time in three games the Australians have beaten the South Africans and they are on the rise.
CONSPIRED AGAINST THEMSELVES
Erasmus said afterwards that “We only have ourselves to blame” and he is right on a couple of levels, and that is not only related to performance but also to selection and scheduling that the Wallabies lost four players to the bin in the last 10 minutes was entirely due to the complete dominance of their pack and the overall impact of their physicality late in the game when the supersonic bench came on.
Had the Boks started with the front row that finished the game, with Lood de Jager as Eben Etzebeth’s lock partner and Jasper Wiese at No 8, the Boks would have won by a comfortable margin. There are no ifs and buts about that.
The Wallabies were quite literally not on the field when the Bok first choices were on and they had to resort to the illegal tactics that got them pinged in order to keep their heads above water and their lead on the scoreboard.
Had it not been for Quan Horn crossing off the last move of the game the Boks might well have built up for another try against an Aussie team that was by that stage back to 13 men and won the game. Which would have been a stupendous effort from being 42-7 down with 12 minutes to go. And the Wallabies being down on numbers was not an excuse for the hosts, they were down because they couldn’t live with their opponents at that point.
That point would have come much earlier in the game had Erasmus selected his team differently, and used the more mobile forwards to finish rather than start. But what would that have proved?
Everyone knows the Boks are better than the Wallabies, the world rankings, No 1 against No 7, show that. Beating the Aussies with the same team that won the seismic Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry series against the All Blacks would have been a bit ho-hum. As in so what?
Instead Erasmus gave his men who had trained so hard and yet not played any games during the New Zealand series a hit out. He would not have been surprised that there was a bit of rust that led to errors and that the team that started was not as cohesive as the one that finished the RGR series in Baltimore.
He’d predicted that beforehand, just as he did when he was in a similar position giving players who hadn’t played for a while a chance in Buenos Aires on 8 August.
HARD TO JUDGE PLAYERS WHO HAVEN’T PLAYED
That cohesion has to come through continuity in selection was something confirmed to him - note, not learned because he would have known it anyway - at Ellis Park when the Boks lost their only game against the All Blacks in the first game of the rubber.
That team hadn’t played together since the England game on 4 July, one and a half months earlier. Most of the players who started in Perth hadn’t played a game of rugby for longer than that.
Which is why it would be wrong to assume because the Boks lost at the Optus Stadium it means there isn’t the depth we thought there was available to the coach. If that Bok team was playing a four-match series against the Wallabies like the one the other side played against the All Blacks, they would probably also have got incrementally better and be better placed to win if there was another game next week.
And on the point of the Perth team being a second string lets beg to differ with that. A second-string team would have had Gerhard Steenekamp at loosehead, Thomas du Toit at tighthead and Jan-Hendrik Wessels at hooker. Cameron Hanekom would definitely be the No 8 and not Marco van Staden, who completed what looked a somewhat incongruous back row.
Incongruous because apart from Van Staden not looking like a No 8, Elrigh Louw also doesn’t look like the traditional Bok blindside flanker.
Unfortunately Ben-Jason Dixon is in the northern hemisphere at the moment with the Stormers because of the concussion issues that prevented him from flying to Baltimore, otherwise he, or the also injured Ruan Venter, would have worn the No 7 and both are a better version of Pieter-Steph du Toit, who was rested, than Louw is.
EMOTIONAL TOLL OF WINNING RGR SHOULDN’T BE UNDERESTIMATED
Mention of Baltimore cues something else. Maybe not enough was made in the buildup to this game about the massive physical and emotional toll taken out of the Boks by the ridiculously stressful, intense and compacted four match New Zealand series.
When the Boks scored a highly emotional win over the All Blacks in Soweto to ensure they’d defended their territory and won that leg of the series, they weren’t able to let their hair down and celebrate, Instead they had to head to the airport ready to fly for 15 hours to the USA.
After they won in Baltimore they were back on the plane, this time to Sydney, which is also a very long flight, and on Thursday it was four and a half hours more to Perth. Not that it is just the travel that was a potential factor - it was the emotional and physical expenditure of being, as skipper for the day Andre Esterhuizen put it afterwards, being in camp for 19 weeks.
Yes, that’s how long it has been for the Boks, who went into camp a few weeks before the opening Nations Championship game against England, and actually for some two weeks before the non test cap game against the Barbarians in Gqeberha on 20 June.
There may have been a week of break in between, but that is an inordinate amount of time to be living in a squad set up in hotels and it would be understandable if there was physical and emotional fatigue.
The one thing that marked the Wallaby performance, apart from the way they won the aerial battle in the first half and fronted the new look Bok scrum and a lineout that for some reason didn’t contest, was their energy.
They were playing the world champions, this was the biggest game of the year for them. And it showed in the way they celebrated afterwards.
ALL A BIT AFTER THE LORD MAYOR'S SHOW
For the Boks, despite the protests to the contrary, it was all a bit “after the Lord Mayor’s show”, with the big event of the year and the big mission of the year accomplished against the All Blacks. After winning in Soweto they went on what was effectively a round the world three week tour (they flew to the USA via a stop in Spain).
That’s expecting a heck of a lot of the players. In that sense, they did well to play such a thrilling part in a bizarre but entertaining test where the result mattered so much less than the four games that came before.
The Boks are never happy to lose these days and neither should they be, and neither should their supporters be. But a defeat was always possible under the circumstances and Erasmus would have weighed that up in making his selection.
They surrendered the Mandela Plate but that is a meaningless trophy in comparison to the one lifted in Baltimore two weeks before.