The Springboks ensured they completed the home leg of their Nations Championship campaign with the maximum available log points by scoring seven tries without reply in an emphatic 43-0 win over Wales that didn’t tell the full story of their overall dominance under the Hollywoodbets Kings Park lights on Saturday.
It was the third game in a row that the Boks won with a bonus point, meaning that they have maximum points from their games played so far. That puts them level with the All Blacks on log points in the southern section of the log, but they are ahead on points differential as this new competition takes a break now until the southern hemisphere teams go north in November.
From the off, it was clear the Boks were going to win because their physical superiority over a nonetheless plucky Wales team was so marked. The first scrum went off uneventfully, but at the second, after seven minutes, the Boks netted their first scrum penalty. And not long after that, they had the Welsh unit freewheeling backwards near their own line.
It was off the next scrum, meaning the one they had put in for because of the havoc they had wreaked, that scrumhalf Cobus Reinach loped around another advancing effort to go in for his team’s second try. That was in the 14th minute, so when debutant Vusi Moyo nailed the conversion, the Boks were going at a point a minute as they led 14-0.
That try followed an earlier one, in the fifth minute, by their powerful No 8 Jasper Wiese. That score came off the kind of play that typified the Boks when they are at their best - a blend of flair and power, with a little break from fullback Aphelele Fassi carried on by Wiese’s brother, Cobus, who put in an impressive charge through the Welsh defences.
The Boks had the momentum, and when Jasper Wiese got the ball, he did not have enough Welsh players in front of him to even remotely have a chance of impeding his progress. It was always going to be a battle that Jasper would win, and he did.
CLEAR FROM THE OFF, WALES COULDN'T CHALLENGE
That initial period saw the Boks so physically dominant that it became clear that this would be a game where the Welsh would struggle to get any points on the board. They didn’t, and but for a brief period after halftime, they never came close, with the Boks having all the possession and go forward and the Welsh struggling to make any impression at all at the gainline when they had ball in hand.
But it was almost as if the Boks had sussed that out too, and while they were physically superior the entire game, they lacked the accuracy that coach Rassie Erasmus might have wanted on this day where the All Blacks earlier sounded an ominous warning ahead of the Greatest Rivalry Series with their clinical annihilation of Ireland at Eden Park in Auckland.
While the passes stuck for the All Blacks thousands of kilometres away, for the Boks, they didn’t, and there were too many errors for comfort. Whether it was forwards knocking on the ball or losing it at the maul, or Fassi dropping kicks at the back, it was a look that was far from perfect.
BOTH TEAMS COUGHING UP BALL POINTS TO CONDITIONS
Admittedly, it was a humid day, certainly by the standards of a winter’s day, and there is also a dew factor at this time of year and this time of night.
That may have been a factor, and the Welsh struggled to hold onto the ball too when they did get it. The handling stats at halftime were 11 to the Boks and three to Wales, something that might have reflected the chasm when it came to how much possession the respective teams commanded as much as anything else.
This was the second successive game that Wales have been whitewashed by the Boks, with this game following on from the 73-0 win scored in Cardiff last November. So that’s effectively 116 points without any reply across 160 minutes of rugby, a very damning stat for the Welsh considering some of them seemed afterwards to be celebrating an achievement.
Indeed, damage limitation seemed to be their goal from quite an early stage, and that may have played a role in the general lack of spectacle and the scrappiness. Until Moyo put across an excellent cross kick that Jesse Kriel scored off on the stroke of halftime, it looked like the Boks might be heading to halftime for the third time in a row where they’d failed to score in the second quarter of the match.
MOYO SOLID BUT FIELD-KICKING ERRATIC INITIALLY
Moyo made a solid debut, but his field kicking was a bit erratic in the first half hour and may have played a role in his Sharks teammate not winning a single aerial contest before halftime. However, immediately after halftime, another rampaging run from Cobus Wiese created the space that enabled Williams’ speed to take him to the Boks’ fourth try, their bonus-point score, which turned a halftime score of 19-0 into 26-0.
It was a try on debut for the speedster, and he later produced an excellent assist to put in reserve scrumhalf Herschel Jantjies, and there is no doubt he has a bright future ahead of him, but he would have ended the game feeling he still has work to do, as would have Moyo.
But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Bok performance was yet another error-ridden performance from Fassi. His little break that sparked the attack that brought the first try was encouraging, but he struggled to win the aerial battle after that, and that was one of those rare days when the Boks came second in that department.
Of course, when you win 43-0, you must have done something right, and that was true - Paul de Villiers was again all over the place in his openside flank role and capped his performance with a try, and the other usual suspects such as Pieter-Steph du Toit and Malcolm Marx joined both Wieses and all the props plus replacement hooker Andre-Hugo Venter in making it a good day for the forwards.
The experienced midfield of Damian de Allende and Kriel was solid and handsomely contributed to the lack of headway available to Wales when they did win any ball. But it says something of how the expectation around the world champion team has grown that at the end, it still felt the Boks were a bit short of where they could have been. Both in terms of end score and overall performance.
SCORES
South Africa 43 - Tries: Jasper Wiese, Cobus Reinach, Jesse Kriel, Jaco Williams, Herschel Jantjies, Kurt-Lee Arendse and Paul de Villiers. Conversions: Vusi Moyo 3 and Manie Libbok. Wales 0.