Not what they hoped for but Boks are still on plan

Wallaby coach Eddie Jones is going to have to turn himself into the Wizard of Oz if the Springboks are to repeat the 2019 feat of winning the Castle Lager Rugby Championship ahead of the World Cup but it doesn’t mean Jacques Nienaber’s men have deviated far from their plan.

For the Boks to win the Championship they will be required to win big against Argentina in Johannesburg in a fortnight’s hence, but that’s the easy part. The harder part is that Australia are going to have to smash the All Blacks in Melbourne on the same day.

On the evidence of the Wallabies slipping to a second successive defeat at the start of the Jones second stint as coach, this time to the Pumas and at home to boot, and the efficiency and energy in the All Black performance in Auckland, that just ain’t going to happen.

However, this being a World Cup year, everything else that happens is secondary. What is really important is that there is a plan, and in giving just about every player who might feature at the World Cup a proper run in the first two matches, the Boks are on plan. Staying on plan though might have come at the cost of surrendering any chance of picking up early winning momentum.

STICKING TO SELECTION PLAN MAY HAVE COST THEM

Hindsight is of course a perfect science, and you could almost imagine from the quotes coming back from Bok coach Jacques Nienaber after Saturday’s 35-20 defeat to the All Blacks that he himself might acknowledge and be troubled a bit by the hindsight verdict that perhaps what cost the South Africans at the Mount Smart Stadium was the selection.

Not that the selection was wrong, but that the success gained from giving the fringe players a start against Australia in Pretoria last week was at the cost of leaving the team that started against the All Blacks a little short of a gallop.

There was a lot of rust evident in an error-ridden first quarter, when the All Blacks seized the initiative and effectively won the game. Admittedly some of the errors came from players, such as fullback Willie le Roux, who’d played the previous week. But perhaps the balance between players who were battle hardened and those who were playing their first game of the international season wasn’t quite as spot on as Nienaber hoped it would be.

“Maybe there was a little bit of over-eagerness from some of the guys and some of them were short of a game – you could see the guys who came on looked a little more battle-hardened. But we’re not making excuses,” said Nienaber in reference to the extraordinary slew of elementary errors and disciplinary infractions that were seen in the first 20 minutes.

“The guys who came back from South Africa only arrived on Tuesday morning and we felt that having a couple of guys here that would be better adapted to the time zones and give us a better chance.

“We knew there were pros and cons. In 2019 a similar thing probably happened, and we had guys who weren’t exposed to Australia, and we were also chasing the game – and we scored a try and kicked the ball out to draw the game. The guys who came on were battle-hardened and that’s why we decided not to go the way we did in 2019 and send over a full 15 fresh guys – we wanted to mix it.”

WINNING RUGBY CHAMPS NO GUARANTEE OF RWC SUCCESS

Given the primacy of the World Cup in the South African thinking, the question is whether Nienaber and his players should care too much about the fact they effectively surrendered the chance to go to the World Cup as Rugby Championship champions. When your stated aim is to win the competition, of course there should be disappointment, but while history reflects that the Boks did win the RWC off the platform of Championship success in 2019, that wasn’t the case when New Zealand won the 2011 and 2015 World Cups. In both those years, the Wallabies won the Championship.

New Zealand only made five changes to the side that thumped Argentina in Mendoza in their opening game of this year’s campaign, so it stood to reason they were more battle hardened than the Boks. And the All Blacks would have known that early in the game was the right time to target them.

The All Blacks played with a furious tempo and intensity and it left the Boks looking stunned. At least in that first 20 minutes. After that the Boks started to come back into it, and were it not for a rather bizarre TMO decision against Cheslin Kolbe when it looked like the Bok wing had scored a good try, the game could still have gone down to the wire despite the big early South African deficit.

The Springboks conceded 17 points in the first 15 minutes and although they edged the scoreboard in the second half (17-15), they had left too much to do to record a third match undefeated in New Zealand.

“The start wasn’t ideal for us. I felt we struggled to get into the game because of poor discipline. We conceded four consecutive penalties and a lot of mistakes were compounded by four or five missed tackles. A quality side like New Zealand they will capitalise on that.

“They did that, and we played catch-up for the rest of the time. We can’t start like that with penalties and errors, probably some of them unforced and some from the pressure exerted on us, and if you’re going to play catch-up it’s going to be tough to get a foothold.

“I don’t think it’s a thing that we regularly start badly – no one goes out to have a poor start and say, ‘let’s save ourselves for the second half’. Sometimes it happens; sometimes you make a mistake or two and are on the back foot. We knew what was coming we just didn’t handle it. Having said that, I’m proud of the way we came back; we scored 17 points in the second half but unfortunately the damage was done in the first half.”