Now is not time to experiment as Boks prepare to cross new frontier

Since the start of the Springboks’ end-of-year tour their coach Jacques Nienaber has been consistent in speaking about the balance between the need to win and the need to push ancillary goals such as growing depth, but now is the time for one goal to far outweigh the other.

At the end of a trying year where they had to jump through more hoops and put up with more hardships than most of their opponents when it came to dealing with Covid curveballs, the Boks are on the cusp of ending the year by achieving something no Bok team has done before. A win over England on Saturday will confirm that they retain their No 1 status in their first playing year after winning a Rugby World Cup.

No World Cup-winning Bok team have done that before. In 1996, the year after Francois Pienaar’s team famously became the first South African national side to win rugby’s Holy Grail, the Boks surrendered their No 1 status by losing a home series against New Zealand.

In 2008, the year after they had won under the coaching of Jake White in Paris, the Boks struggled in the injury-enforced absence of regular skipper John Smit and in their quest to adapt to new coach Peter de Villiers and slipped down the rankings.

BOKS HAVE DONE BETTER THAN THEY SHOULD HAVE

Regardless of what happens at Twickenham on Saturday, the Boks will end the year feeling they’ve done better than they should have been expected to given that they played no rugby at all during 2020 and that their home-based players had to endure the toughest lockdown of all the rugby playing nations. Japan was the only other team that did not play in the first Covid year.

Nienaber has often said that his team is a year behind where it should be in terms of growth and he is right. He never got the opportunity to blood new players that he should have in 2020 and it was why his men went in against the British and Irish Lions relying so heavily on their World Cup-winning template.

If you think about it, if you disregard the light-hearted romp against Georgia, the Boks effectively went from the World Cup final in November 2019 straight into a first test against the Lions 20 months later. That they won the series was an astounding achievement that was unfortunately undermined by the begrudging carping of overseas critics who took issue with the style with which they did it.

EXCUSING ALL BLACKS BECAUSE OF FATIGUE IS HYPOCRISY

This brings us to an interesting point - a lot of those same critics are now sugar coating New Zealand’s defeat to Ireland in Dublin at the weekend by pointing to their tough tour and what they have had to go through over the past few months. And let’s not deny that the All Blacks do look tired, they do look flat.

But have they been through any more than the Boks have, certainly what the Boks had to do between the months of June into July, when at one point half the squad was down with Covid ahead of the Lions series, through to October? That was a period of four months where they were almost constantly isolated and quarantined in camp when they were not playing.

If the All Blacks can be excused because of fatigue for their poor performance against the Irish, and it was a poor performance by their standards and the nine-point losing margin flattered them hugely, then shouldn’t the Boks be excused for the aberration of their two defeats against Australia when they had just come out of a hard fortnight of quarantine?

Certainly, if you look back at the Bok year so far, you can only really pinpoint those two games as moments when the Boks let their crown slip. They could easily have won both tests against the All Blacks despite the mental fatigue so many of us were writing about at the time. It was those two Wallaby tests, where the Boks’ execution went to pot and they started to deviate a bit from the style that won them a World Cup and a Lions series, that lost the Boks the Rugby Championship.

It was on the basis of their winning the Championship that the All Blacks climbed back to No 1, but if there were ranking points offered for a Lions series that would not have been the case. The Lions had not lost a series since 2009 and beating them was a considerable achievement and it should not have been surprising if there was a bit of a sense of anti-climax about the Boks when they got to Australia.

KIWI REPUTATION BUILT AROUND BEATING AUSTRALIA

But seeing there is so much biting opinion about the Boks from Down Under, both New Zealand and Australia, let’s examine the hubris that there has been around the All Blacks this year a little closer too. A record number of tries and points has seen some express the opinion that the Kiwis are a special team.

They may become that if some of the youngsters develop, but at this point, they are far from a special team. They are an average team by All Black standards - note that qualification - that has built up its reputation through a sequence of thumping wins against a Wallabies team that played naive rugby against them.

The Pumas weren’t at the races this year because they’ve had to put up with as much if not more Covid curveballs since the World Cup than the Boks have, so the only team that they played before they went to Europe that you could say played real rugby against them was the Boks. And that was pretty much a stalemate, though it has to be said the Bok forwards are distinctly better than theirs and forwards win World Cups.

BEST FORWARD UNIT ON THE PLANET

It is that forward pack, which is easily the best forward unit on the planet right now, that should give the Boks the advantage against England, just as they did in Yokohama two years ago. There is a movie we constantly see being replayed, where a team does well at forward ahead of playing against the Boks and then gets woken up in a rather rude way.

It happened in 2019. England thought they were cooking at forward when they dominated the All Blacks in their semifinal. A week later, they played against the Bok pack and were smashed off the park. This past weekend was a similar scenario. The Scots built up their confidence by winning the forward battle against Australia. Against the Boks, the boot was on the other foot.

Talking of World Cups, let’s not forget either that the last big game against a northern hemisphere team that the All Blacks played before they got to Europe for their current trip was the 2019 World Cup semifinal against England. We know what happened there. In fact, it wasn’t dissimilar to what happened to them against Ireland, where they lost by nine points but it could easily have been 19.

If you lump those two results together, the All Blacks certainly look far from invincible when they play the top Six Nations teams, and they clearly aren’t unbeatable when they play the Boks either. Cracks are showing.

BOKS SHORT OF BEST BUT STILL UP THERE

The Boks haven’t been at their best this year. Nienaber would be the first to acknowledge that and neither should they have been expected to be at their best. But although they are a year behind their rivals in terms of playing time, they are right up there when it comes to the balance of power between nations.

Forget the criticism of the Bok playing style, for Scotland coach Gregor Townsend summed it up perfectly after his team’s defeat at Murrayfield - there is a reason the Springboks are world champions. What they do may not be popular with all their opponents and some of their critics, but it gets them the success every international team strives for.

They will finish the year as the No 1 team on the planet if they beat England. That’s enough reason to drop any thoughts of giving players game time with the 2023 World Cup in mind and go with the best possible team, the one that Nienaber would choose if the Twickenham game was a World Cup final.

Nienaber might well see the irony in being exhorted to go with a win at all costs approach when for the past few months there have been sections of the media pushing him to make changes and experiment. But while it would be stretching it to suggest Saturday is at the same level of a World Cup final, the carrot of ending this extraordinary comeback year to international rugby still at No 1 does present an interesting new frontier for the Boks to cross. And this Bok team like crossing new frontiers.

MAIN WEEKEND INTERNATIONAL RESULTS

Scotland 15 South Africa 30

Italy 16 Argentina 37

Ireland 29 New Zealand 20

England 32 Australia 15