There’s been an assumption that the Springbok visit to the New Zealand fortress of Eden Park at the beginning of September will be the biggest rugby international of this year and arguably the biggest since the World Cup final. That may remain true from a global perspective, but for the South Africans, Saturday’s game in Cape Town may have become even bigger.
It’s not just the chance of retaining their Castle Lager Rugby Championship title that will go out of the window if the Boks somehow conspire to lose again to Australia at the DHL Stadium. So will a considerable part of their aura as the world’s leading team, and the confidence of both the players and the South African public that supports them.
Experienced centre Damian de Allende may have summed up the mood when, during the week, he said that the attitude of their supporters to the Boks felt very different to the players in comparison to the last time they were in Cape Town after a chastening defeat. That was in 2016, when they lost to Ireland, the first time ever that the Boks had lost to that nation on home soil.
According to De Allende, nine years ago, the players were sworn at. This time, when they go to the gym or out for a coffee around the team hotel on the foreshore, they encounter the same love that there was before the shuddering wake-up call that was delivered by the Wallabies in Johannesburg last week.
And there's a good reason for that. One defeat doesn’t make you a bad team, no matter how bad it is. Not when you’ve won most of your games before that over a long period. Plus, it was pretty obvious what happened at Ellis Park - yes, the Wallabies played well, but coach Rassie Erasmus was not clutching at straws or making any kind of false claim when he stated that the Boks had simply overplayed and, in the process, run themselves off their own feet.
Most of the media match reports written before Erasmus even spoke at the post-match press conference would have said the same thing, and his opposite number in Australia’s coaching box, Joe Schmidt, followed the same theme when he suggested that the Boks got seduced by how easy it was for them early doors.
Schmidt said that in his many years in rugby, he’d seen that happen, and so have most of us who have followed the game over a long period of time. You have the momentum, you think you are so on top that you can, to use a cricketing analogy, start reverse sweeping everything. Suddenly, you don’t have the momentum anymore, the opposition do, and it is difficult to regain it. Or you find it is too late to recover, as was the case after a flurry of tries suddenly turned a Bok lead into a deficit in Johannesburg.
EASY TO WRITE OFF LAST WEEK AS AN ABERRATION
So it is easy to write off last week as an aberration. This might come across as very un-South African, but you could easily suggest that it might have been a good thing for the Boks. Now that they have had their wakeup call, there will be no complacency or arrogance, and it might be a good thing for them to be going a fortnight from now to Eden Park, where New Zealand haven’t lost a test match since 1994, without the burden of being the favourites.
There’s nothing that galvanises South African sportsmen, and particularly rugby players, than feeling like they are in a backs-to-the-wall position, and last week’s result has conspired to make Saturday’s game far more interesting than it might have been had the Boks done what they were en route to doing before halftime last week of running up 50 points against the Wallabies.
As it is now, we can see last week as an aberration similar to the shock defeat in Brisbane to the Wallabies by John Smit’s team in 2009. Remember that? The Boks had won four games in a row in that Tri-Nations and hammered the Wallabies by a big score by playing an attacking game that surprised their opponents in Perth the week before.
The Aussies, knowing the Boks would be expansive again, decided to adopt the Boks’ more traditional approach and beat them at their own game in Brisbane, pretty much like what happened last week. But a week later, when the Boks went to Hamilton for the Tri-Nations decider, they were back to their best after the wakeup call and completed a 3-0 whitewash of the All Blacks.
Don’t bet against history repeating itself, and don’t bet your house against last week’s game being a galvaniser that will turn Saturday into a turning point for the Boks. They are good enough, they’ve achieved enough, to recover from their poor start and win the Championship.
A LOSS WOULD BE A MASSIVE SETBACK
But what if they lose on Saturday? We won’t be able to talk about aberrations then. We won’t be able to cast off what happened in Johannesburg as a one-off? The Bok crown would suddenly be looking a bit skew and vulnerable. After all, the Wallabies lost the Lions series, and arrived in this country rated sixth in the world.
Erasmus sees how important this game is, which is why he’s selected the kind of squad he might have called up for a World Cup final. The appearance of Eben Etzebeth and Lood de Jager in bench roles gives them a Bomb Squad deluxe on Saturday, and the conditions should favour the quest for Bok forward domination and a suffocation strategy that should reverse last week’s result.
My own view is that while the Aussies caught the Boks out last week, the difference between the teams is probably the 17 points the South Africans led by at Ellis Park. We can expect that to be the approximate difference between the sides at DHL Stadium.
While the Boks have lost key players to injury this week, they have more depth than the Wallabies, who have also paid the price for how bruising the Johannesburg game was. If the starting team hasn’t done the business already, the superior Bok bench should make sure when they come onto the field, that last week’s experience will be avenged.
TEAMS
South Africa: Willie le Roux, Canan Moodie, Jesse Kriel (captain), Damian de Allende, Cheslin Kolbe, Handre Pollard, Grant Williams, Jean-Luc du Preez, Franco Mostert, Marco van Staden, Ruan Nortje, RG Snyman, Thomas du Toit, Malcolm Marx, Ox Nche. Replacements: Marnus van der Merwe, Boan Venter, Wilco Louw, Eben Etzebeth, Lood de Jager, Kwagga Smith, Cobus Reinach, Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu.
Australia: Tom Wright, Max Jorgensen, Joseph-Akuso Suaali, Len Ikitau, Corey Toole, James O’Connor, Nic White, Rob Valetini, Fraser McReight (captain), Tom Hooper, Will Skelton, Nick Frost, Taniela Tupou, Billy Pollard, Tom Robertson. Replacements: Brandon Paenga-Amosa, Angus Bell, Zane Nonggar, Jeremy Williams, Nick Champion de Crespigny, Tate McDermott, Tane Edmed, Andrew Kellaway.
Referee: James Doleman (New Zealand).
Kick-off: 5.10pm
Prediction: South Africa to win by 15 to 18