Springbok coach Jacques Nienaber said after his team’s tense semifinal win over England that a haul of 30 points would be needed by the winning side in Saturday’s Rugby World Cup final, but he may not have taken the weather forecast into account.
Currently showers are predicted for the day of the big showdown between rugby union’s most successful nations, New Zealand and South Africa, at Stade de France. It may not be quite as inclement, and the rain as steady, as it was for last Saturday’s semifinal, and these days coaching teams are exact and scientific.
So there may be an attempt by both teams to establish when the predicted rain is expected to fall.
But although it is of course also true that steady rain, and another sodden field and slippery ball, will mitigate against the big New Zealand strength against a team that could get the better of them at forward, namely their attacking continuity, last week’s narrow squeak against England wasn’t a great advertisement for the Bok ability to play wet weather rugby.
HISTORICALLY BOKS HAVEN’T BEEN GREAT IN THE WET
Indeed, it is hard to think back through history to when there was a major Bok triumph on a wet day.
In my own recall, Gerrie Germishuys’s winning try against the British Lions in the third test of the 1980 series in Port Elizabeth, thus clinching an unassailable lead in the rubber, springs to mind.
So does a Carel du Plessis's winning try in the first game against the 1986 New Zealand Cavaliers in Cape Town.
Both of those were wet weather games. Both of them were played with Naas Botha at flyhalf, so perhaps it isn’t so surprising the Boks got it right.
Botha was a genius as a kicking tactician. Unlike Manie Libbok, but a little bit more like Handre Pollard, Botha was a pivot tailored for a wet weather game.
There was another Bok win in wet weather that springs to mind, but the England side that lost 18-0 at Newlands in 1998 was understrength so it wasn’t considered a major achievement.
The Boks would undeniably have put that England team away by a lot more had it been dry.
As for other wet weather games involving the Boks, and this is taken straight out of the head so perhaps one is being missed, there are two that spring to mind.
In 2001, with Harry Viljoen as the coach and espousing the running game, the Boks lost a match in atrocious conditions in Cape Town to the All Blacks.
The end score was 12-3 and after that Viljoen switched to a more conservative approach and into the confusion that eventually saw him resign.
The other was also in Cape Town, and it is perhaps significant, as it was against the team the Boks struggled against his past weekend, England.
The reference is to the 2018 “dead rubber” game at Newlands, with the Bok loss coming against the run of play and momentum in that series.
CONDITIONS TAILORED FOR TEAM THAT KICKED MOST
So maybe England are just a better wet weather team than the Boks? Maybe, but regardless of how you answer the question, there can’t be any denying that the conditions at Stade de France for the semifinal played into England’s hands.
England went into that game as the team that had kicked the most in the tournament.
They averaged 33 kicks a game. And they will end as the team that kicked the most in the tournament after hoofing the ball 41 times against the Springboks, thus equaling what Wales did, to so much criticism from the English media, in the kick-a-thon 2019 semifinal against the Boks in Yokohama.
The Boks were pilloried back then for kicking too much - they kicked around the same number of times in that game as Wales did - and it was a similar story when they beat the British and Irish Lions in the 2021 series that was played with Covid as a backdrop.
Their approach saw them accused by the overseas media of playing something that was dubbed “anti-rugby”.
They’ve moved away from that now, and ever since a narrow loss to France in Marseille last November when they appeared to stun their opponents by running back kick receipt, they’ve been much less predictable when it comes to what they do with the ball kicked onto them.
To the extent where it could be argued that had it been a dry day for this most recent semifinal, the Boks might have punished England for kicking so much.
The Boks kicked 29 times in the game, which was up on their average for the tournament so far of 21 per game, which is significantly less than the 30 per game they produced in 2019 and left them before the semifinal as the fourth last when it came to number of kicks.
While the 29 kicks last weekend was close to the 2019 average, it is still revealing in the sense that as the team that had to do most of the defending, you’d have expected them to kick more.
There again, much of England’s kicking was of the contestable variety, and on the day they were good at getting those contestable kicks back.
It was what England did with the ball that was won back from contestable kicks that lost them the game.
That and their inability to adjust their tactics away from a plan that inevitably led to more scrums at a time that the South Africans had become dominant in that phase.
In the semifinal, England, who kicked 93 per cent of their possession, became the only team in this World Cup not to have made a single line-break in the entire game.
Their slow ruck speed - they are the slowest in the competition at that - might have helped them in some ways as they did look calmer and more steady than the Boks and made fewer mistakes for most of the way, but it doesn’t help their attacking potency when it should be on to strike. In neither of the two games played at this World Cup against top tier nations, Argentina and South Africa, did England score a try.
CONDITIONS SHOULD DETERMINE SELECTION AND TACTICS
On Saturday the Boks are up in the decider against a team that will be well acquainted with playing in the wet.
Not for nothing is New Zealand known as “the land of the long white cloud”. But they are also a team that likes to play high tempo rugby, which may mean that a wet day could set a reversal of roles for the Boks in the final.
They’ve evolved so much as an attacking team, and those who wonder whether Libbok should have started against France are overlooking his role in the transition tries that kept his team in the game, but if it is wet this might be a time to revert to Plan A of the Lions series.
There’s no denying what Libbok can bring if it is dry, and he’d surely be a definite starter if the conditions were similar to when he starred in the big win scored by the Boks over the All Blacks at Twickenham in a warmup game.
However, if it is wet, it is just logical to start with Pollard and with Faf de Klerk. Given the struggles with the aerial game against England, surely the height of Canan Moodie should also be considered on the wing.
The Boks won comfortably against the All Blacks in Nelspruit last year just by suffocating them, not by being adventurous, and while the All Blacks’ forward play has improved since then, and the Boks lose a lot by not having the man of the match from that game, Malcolm Marx, it might be South Africa’s route to World Cup title No 4.
The All Blacks do have better stats than South Africa in most areas around attack and even aspects of forward play, yet that old saying that statistics can sometimes just be lies could apply here.
Comparing what the Kiwis have faced at this tournament with what the Boks have is not comparing apples to apples.
The Boks have played all of the current other members of the top six on the rankings at this World Cup.
The All Blacks have played just two in the form of France, who they lost to in the opening game, and Ireland, who they beat in the quarterfinal.
In between all of that they were able to fill their boots against much inferior opposition.
Maybe if the Boks had played the likes of Uruguay, Namibia and Italy along the way their stats would be similar to the Kiwis.