Speaking on the World Rugby podcast the day after his former Springbok teammates had won against France, Francois Louw summed up the fears of many South African supporters: “There have been teams that have got ahead of themselves before.”
The former Bok, Stormers and Bath loose-forward was probably referring to England’s experience of the 1999 tournament in Japan. Those of us who were there will vouch for the confidence of the English people who were in Tokyo for that final. England had smashed the All Blacks, while SA just scraped in against Wales, and on those grounds, they saw themselves as champions in waiting.
It was drummed home that the English were getting ahead of themselves when I bumped into some of the English media in the lift at the hotel where I was staying. They were debating whether they should stay on another week so they could go to the final, but were fairly adamant the decider would be an anti-climax. To them, the final had been played, the next week would be an anti-climax.
The same assumption was encountered when I was a guest on the Times and Sunday Times podcast in midweek. My contention that yes, England had beaten the All Blacks, but the Boks weren’t the Kiwis and would pose a different set of questions, was met with derision. The next day, the same derision came from a well-known UK sports photographer encountered on a platform at an underground station.
KIWIS ALSO PLAYED THEIR FINAL A WEEK EARLY IN 2019
Yet while Louw and many others are using the England reference point as a warning that sometimes a team can end up playing their final a week early, England might in fact not be the best example of it.
A better example is actually the team that England beat to get to the final. England did play well in that semifinal, but the All Blacks just never pitched. And why that was the case might have been telegraphed in the buildup when their coach Steve Hansen had appeared to be more preoccupied with the Boks as potential final opponents than the team that stood in their immediate path.
The All Blacks had comprehensively outplayed Ireland in their quarterfinal, a game they had built up to over a long period of time as the Irish were the one team apart from South Africa that gave them trouble in that four-year cycle. New Zealand rugby writers confirmed that the attitude in the Kiwi camp was one of being that they’d won their first big one against Ireland and the next big game was against the Boks.
Against England, they didn’t know what hit them, and the underdogs got such strong momentum on their side that they became impossible to stop. However, whether England then conformed to the post-final narrative from their fans and media that they were beaten by the Boks because they’d played their final against the All Blacks is debatable. South Africa were a better team than England and were in a space in that final week which meant they were probably destined to win that final regardless of the England attitude.
Which is to say that England didn’t lose in 2019 just because they’d expended all their energy and emotion on the New Zealand game. However, it does feed a narrative that the Boks are aware of and which is why South Africans maybe shouldn’t fear the potential jeopardy that comes with their team being such overwhelming favourites to win Saturday’s semifinal in Paris.
ONE-STEP-AT-A-TIME APPROACH SERVES BOKS WELL
If you do fear it, perhaps it is a good idea to pay attention to the way Louw on Monday morning was dealing with what the Boks have to do next. It is four years on since he was last in the Bok changeroom, but he clearly hasn’t forgotten the attitude that the Boks adopted under Rassie Erasmus then and which he knows is their attitude now under Erasmus and head coach Jacques Nienaber.
To sum up what he had to say, yes, the Boks are favourites, they have a good chance of making the final, but the game against England still has to be played and it is as much a final as last weekend’s seismic clash with the then World No 2 team and tournament hosts.
“We take it one game at a time,” meaning the next game is always a final, has become a bit of a cliche when listening to Bok players speak but it nonetheless should be taken literally and as such that is bad news for England if they are hoping for some complacency in the opposition ranks. It is not about them against the All Blacks right now, even though both teams are hot favourites to advance to the first final they will play against each other since Ellis Park in 1995, but about South Africa against England.
Of course, as Louw and another experienced World Cup campaigner who was a guest on the podcast, former All Black captain Tana Umaga, pointed out, it is hard to tell just how much the tight quarterfinals played last weekend will have taken out of the Boks and the All Blacks, both physically and emotionally. Both had to dig deep, both had to put in more tackles than their opponents, both were defending at the final whistle.
For both, there was huge potential for the quarterfinal to be their last game in the tournament, and they approached it like there was no tomorrow. Both camps celebrated at the final whistle as if it was the final itself. For both, the role they play going into the semifinal is the opposite of the one they played going into last weekend - they are now favourites, and overwhelmingly so.
BOKS HAVE THE DEPTH TO FRESHEN UP
There are many intriguing questions to be asked ahead of the game, and ahead of the team selection. Perhaps the latter more so for the Boks, who have such incredible depth and can call on players of almost equal ability in just about every position. It might be seen as a huge risk to change up the team for a semifinal, as it would be blamed for a defeat, but the Boks do have the players to be able to do it, thus ensuring freshness, should the coaches believe it is necessary.
Jesse Kriel was brilliant against France and was hugely influential in securing the victory, yet it was a performance of such Herculean proportions that it would hardly be surprising if he carried the effects of it this week. Lukhanyo Am is with the squad but what might be more instructive to a potential change in selection this week is the fact that young Canan Moodie has been up for media duty since the quarterfinal. Even though he never played in that game.
Could that be a sign he is playing on Saturday? The Boks wouldn’t lose much if anything if he was, and they wouldn’t if a clutch of other players started. There again, Erasmus and Nienaber have been clever, and scientific, in the way they’ve approached the tournament - of all the teams, it is they who have the squad with the most equal spread of game time between the players.
Ireland, because they had to play the Boks and Scotland in their last two games of the Pool phase, went into the All Black game with a team that had perhaps been ever so slightly over-played. I must confess that I thought before the game that their easier passage through the group stage might have hindered the All Blacks, but it looked the opposite. They were the team that sizzled at kick-off time, Ireland took a while to get into the game and were perhaps just a few percentage points off their usual full gallop.
TIMING OF SUBSTITUTIONS HAS HELPED
The Boks had one massive showdown with Ireland in the buildup to the France game and it would have helped them, but much of the team that played in the quarterfinal was rested for the final pool game against Tonga. Even in the game itself, it wasn’t as if all the Bok players had to put in over-taxing shifts due to the clever timing of substitutions.
And that takes us back again to 2019, when both Erasmus and then later the then-England coach Eddie Jones acknowledged the advantage the Boks might have created for themselves from the player management benefits spawned by their clever utilisation of the so-called Bomb Squad in that tournament.
England didn’t have to play France in the quarterfinal and they haven’t played a team within the top six in this tournament. That might be an advantage for them against a team that has had to play the No 5 ranked team, the No 1 ranked team and the No 2 ranked team to get to this point. Oh, by the way, they played the No 4 ranked team two weeks before the tournament too.
Yet while the different routes they took to the semifinals may be England’s big hope, meaning that less may have been taken out of them than has been taken out of the South Africans, that didn’t really look to be the case after their close win over Fiji in Marseille. They were playing lesser opponents and it was definitely a lower tier and inferior game to either of the Paris quarterfinals, but Owen Farrell’s team had to work as hard for victory as the Boks did.
They also don't have the depth, no other team has, that the Boks have, and therefore don't have the leeway their opponents may have when it comes to ensuring or even creating freshness.