Jean Claude Vaaldamme
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I hate nothing more than people reporting posts. But in this case, thank you, whoever did.
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The Rugby Thread - Part Deux
- Thread starter Mephisto_Helix
- Start date
Crowley
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Don't feel too special. Some of mine was deleted as well.
lexity
Honorary Master
Can you guess the reaction of both guests, to this question?
One an ex-springbok player, the other a Stormers coach.
You could have cut that reaction with knife. I wonder if they are thinking of the R23 million lawsuit launched against the investigative sports journalist.
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MuterOfWorlds
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Better than McCaw?
L-Dog
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If we win the WC again 100% yes, now maybe 50/50. Think Siya unites the team more than McCaw, but McCaw was a better player.
Speedster
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Do you think you are adding value to this thread?
Heisenborg
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Dont feed the troll
sand_man
Honorary Master
An interesting article from Gary Gold
Rugby’s greatest rivalry was sold to us as four Tests between the two best teams in the world, and for once the billing was right.
South Africa won it 3–1, and there is no argument about that.
They are the best team in the world and they proved it again, on their own grounds, against the side that has been their measure for a hundred years.
But there is a number inside this series that I cannot stop thinking about, and I suspect the keen rugby watcher noticed it too. New Zealand scored 17 tries in the four Tests. South Africa scored 14. The team that scored more tries lost three Tests out of four.
That is not a quirk. It is the story of the series, and it says something about both teams that the scoreline on its own cannot. So I want to walk through it the way a coach would, area by area, and then say why I think the All Blacks will go home quietly confident rather than shattered, and why the Springboks, who won fair and square, will know exactly which parts of their game a smarter opponent will come for.
The attack that won everything except the games.
Start with what New Zealand did well, because it was a lot.
Seventeen tries to fourteen. Thirty-four clean line breaks to twenty-nine. A hundred and twenty-nine defenders beaten to a hundred. And the one that would make any attack coach smile: when New Zealand got into the South African 22, they scored a try more than half the time (17 tries from 32 visits). South Africa converted just over a third of theirs (14 from 38).
Think about that for a moment. Against the most organised defence in the world, on South African soil, the All Blacks were the more efficient attacking side in three of the four Tests. Will Jordan alone carried for more than 500 metres and made seven clean breaks. They scored four or more tries in every single Test.
If you had shown a rugby person those numbers before the series and asked them to guess the result, most would have called it for New Zealand. So where did the ten-point series margin (121 points to 111) actually come from?
One team took the three points. The other never asked for them.
This is the first place, and it is not subtle.
South Africa kicked at goal ten times in the series and landed nine of them. Twenty-seven points. New Zealand kicked at goal once in four Tests, from just inside their own half in the third Test, and missed.
Every other penalty they won in South African territory went to the corner: 27 kicks to touch over the four games. Those corner lineouts brought five tries and a handful of further penalties, which is a decent return. They also brought four penalties conceded, five turnovers and four scrums.
I am not going to tell you New Zealand would have won by kicking their goals, because nobody knows what a game becomes when you change one decision inside it. But in Cape Town the margin was seven points and South Africa’s four penalty goals were worth twelve. A team that never uses the tee is giving its opponent a head start on the scoreboard before a ball is kicked, and against a Springbok side that conceded 40 penalties of its own across the series, there were points lying on the grass that were never picked up.
Where did South Africa’s kicks come from? New Zealand conceded 45 penalties, 30 of them in their own half, and twenty of those thirty were three offences: scrum (eleven), offside (five) and not releasing the tackled player (four). That is the important bit for anyone who cares about how teams improve. It is not “discipline” in the vague way the word gets used on television. It is three specific things, and three specific things can be fixed.
A scrum that won more penalties than some teams win lineouts.
New Zealand conceded 14 scrum penalties across the four Tests. Eleven of them came at scrums South Africa was feeding. Their four most-penalised players in the series were all props: Fletcher Newell, Tyrel Lomax, George Bower and Ethan de Groot, seventeen penalties between them.
The bit I find interesting is that the Springbok scrum did not have a special series. It won penalties at almost exactly the rate it had been winning them all year. What changed was the other side of it: New Zealand’s concession rate roughly doubled. An old weapon met a front row that could not absorb it on the defensive feed.
The direct cost was at least thirteen points: two penalty goals at Ellis Park and the penalty try in the third Test all came from scrum offences. The indirect cost, the field position and the twenty-four penalties South Africa chose to kick to the corner rather than at the posts, is harder to price but bigger.
And there is a third cost that no scoreboard shows, and which I think is the one that cannot and must not be underestimated. It is what that scrum does to the opposition’s heads. When a pack knows that every scrum on its own feed is a coin toss between clean ball and a penalty against, it changes how the nine plays, how the ten stands, how the back row commits, how the whole team feels about a knock-on in the middle of the field. The Springbok scrum is a physical weapon, but the damage it does is as much psychological as it is on the scoreboard, and that is honestly a subject worth a piece of its own.
The lineout: 84% is respectable everywhere except against the Springboks
New Zealand won 47 of their 56 lineout throws, 84%. South Africa won 41 of 43, 95%, with Malcolm Marx throwing 33 of 34.
I want to be fair here. 84% is not a collapse; it is roughly where the All Black lineout has been operating all season, and against most teams it is enough. Against this South African side it is not, because the nine lost throws were not random. Four were handling errors on the front ball between thrower and jumper. Four were middle balls stolen clean by South Africa. One was overthrown. Seven of the nine were off-the-top calls, and four of the nine were in New Zealand’s own half, where losing your lineout means losing your exit, and usually a penalty or a scrum on your own line two phases later.
This is where I want to go back a few years, because it is a story I lived from the other side.
When I was with the Springboks in the 2009 era, everyone in world rugby knew the lineout Victor Matfield ran was the best there was. It was obvious. And yet the All Blacks of that time would still find a way to win their own ball, sometimes untidily, sometimes off a shortened line or a quick throw, but they won enough of it to give themselves platforms to play off.
Our scrum in those years was a good scrum, but it was not the power unit the current Springbok pack is. What won us three Tests in a row against New Zealand that season was our ability to steal their ball, and to maul very effectively off our own. Set piece, in other words, and the decisions that came off it.
And what did the All Blacks do? They regrouped. Their management looked at what had beaten them, fixed it, and went on to win the next two World Cups. I mention this not to be nostalgic but because the shape of it is so familiar. The Springboks beat them at set piece and on the scoreboard, and the All Blacks were not nearly as far away as three straight defeats suggested.
Back to the present.
Front-ball handling is thrower and lifter timing. Middle-ball security against a side that reads the middle is call recognition and a decision about when to go long. Neither requires new players. A rugby country with New Zealand’s depth of lineout knowledge fixes both in a training block.
On the other side of the ball, the maul is the Springboks’ try engine and it delivered again: three maul tries and a penalty try, and five tries from the eleven lineouts they threw inside the New Zealand 22. If you are ever preparing a side to play them, know that eleven of those twelve attacking throws were won cleanly. The contest is in the maul after the catch, not in the air.
Ellis Park was the All Black breakdown at its best. It never happened again.
The first Test at Ellis Park was one of the great breakdown performances. New Zealand won eighteen turnovers: six jackals from eight attempts, six tackle turnovers, more at the ruck. South Africa’s cleanout that day failed eight times, and the Springbok attack coughed up 22 turnovers in the match, seven of them inside the New Zealand 22. South Africa led 16–12 early in the second half and lost 33–16.
A week later New Zealand won one turnover. One. They did not attempt a single jackal in Cape Town. South Africa did not fail a single clear out in 192 arrivals at the ruck. Across the last three Tests combined New Zealand won 19 turnovers, fewer than they had won in the first eighty minutes.
I have been in a Springbok camp on the Monday after a breakdown like Ellis Park, and I can tell you what that week looks like. I cannot tell you from the outside exactly what they changed. What I can tell you is that in the two Tests South Africa won most comfortably, their cleanout failed once in 407 arrivals. Once.
Rugby’s greatest rivalry was sold to us as four Tests between the two best teams in the world, and for once the billing was right.
South Africa won it 3–1, and there is no argument about that.
They are the best team in the world and they proved it again, on their own grounds, against the side that has been their measure for a hundred years.
But there is a number inside this series that I cannot stop thinking about, and I suspect the keen rugby watcher noticed it too. New Zealand scored 17 tries in the four Tests. South Africa scored 14. The team that scored more tries lost three Tests out of four.
That is not a quirk. It is the story of the series, and it says something about both teams that the scoreline on its own cannot. So I want to walk through it the way a coach would, area by area, and then say why I think the All Blacks will go home quietly confident rather than shattered, and why the Springboks, who won fair and square, will know exactly which parts of their game a smarter opponent will come for.
The attack that won everything except the games.
Start with what New Zealand did well, because it was a lot.
Seventeen tries to fourteen. Thirty-four clean line breaks to twenty-nine. A hundred and twenty-nine defenders beaten to a hundred. And the one that would make any attack coach smile: when New Zealand got into the South African 22, they scored a try more than half the time (17 tries from 32 visits). South Africa converted just over a third of theirs (14 from 38).
Think about that for a moment. Against the most organised defence in the world, on South African soil, the All Blacks were the more efficient attacking side in three of the four Tests. Will Jordan alone carried for more than 500 metres and made seven clean breaks. They scored four or more tries in every single Test.
If you had shown a rugby person those numbers before the series and asked them to guess the result, most would have called it for New Zealand. So where did the ten-point series margin (121 points to 111) actually come from?
One team took the three points. The other never asked for them.
This is the first place, and it is not subtle.
South Africa kicked at goal ten times in the series and landed nine of them. Twenty-seven points. New Zealand kicked at goal once in four Tests, from just inside their own half in the third Test, and missed.
Every other penalty they won in South African territory went to the corner: 27 kicks to touch over the four games. Those corner lineouts brought five tries and a handful of further penalties, which is a decent return. They also brought four penalties conceded, five turnovers and four scrums.
I am not going to tell you New Zealand would have won by kicking their goals, because nobody knows what a game becomes when you change one decision inside it. But in Cape Town the margin was seven points and South Africa’s four penalty goals were worth twelve. A team that never uses the tee is giving its opponent a head start on the scoreboard before a ball is kicked, and against a Springbok side that conceded 40 penalties of its own across the series, there were points lying on the grass that were never picked up.
Where did South Africa’s kicks come from? New Zealand conceded 45 penalties, 30 of them in their own half, and twenty of those thirty were three offences: scrum (eleven), offside (five) and not releasing the tackled player (four). That is the important bit for anyone who cares about how teams improve. It is not “discipline” in the vague way the word gets used on television. It is three specific things, and three specific things can be fixed.
A scrum that won more penalties than some teams win lineouts.
New Zealand conceded 14 scrum penalties across the four Tests. Eleven of them came at scrums South Africa was feeding. Their four most-penalised players in the series were all props: Fletcher Newell, Tyrel Lomax, George Bower and Ethan de Groot, seventeen penalties between them.
The bit I find interesting is that the Springbok scrum did not have a special series. It won penalties at almost exactly the rate it had been winning them all year. What changed was the other side of it: New Zealand’s concession rate roughly doubled. An old weapon met a front row that could not absorb it on the defensive feed.
The direct cost was at least thirteen points: two penalty goals at Ellis Park and the penalty try in the third Test all came from scrum offences. The indirect cost, the field position and the twenty-four penalties South Africa chose to kick to the corner rather than at the posts, is harder to price but bigger.
And there is a third cost that no scoreboard shows, and which I think is the one that cannot and must not be underestimated. It is what that scrum does to the opposition’s heads. When a pack knows that every scrum on its own feed is a coin toss between clean ball and a penalty against, it changes how the nine plays, how the ten stands, how the back row commits, how the whole team feels about a knock-on in the middle of the field. The Springbok scrum is a physical weapon, but the damage it does is as much psychological as it is on the scoreboard, and that is honestly a subject worth a piece of its own.
The lineout: 84% is respectable everywhere except against the Springboks
New Zealand won 47 of their 56 lineout throws, 84%. South Africa won 41 of 43, 95%, with Malcolm Marx throwing 33 of 34.
I want to be fair here. 84% is not a collapse; it is roughly where the All Black lineout has been operating all season, and against most teams it is enough. Against this South African side it is not, because the nine lost throws were not random. Four were handling errors on the front ball between thrower and jumper. Four were middle balls stolen clean by South Africa. One was overthrown. Seven of the nine were off-the-top calls, and four of the nine were in New Zealand’s own half, where losing your lineout means losing your exit, and usually a penalty or a scrum on your own line two phases later.
This is where I want to go back a few years, because it is a story I lived from the other side.
When I was with the Springboks in the 2009 era, everyone in world rugby knew the lineout Victor Matfield ran was the best there was. It was obvious. And yet the All Blacks of that time would still find a way to win their own ball, sometimes untidily, sometimes off a shortened line or a quick throw, but they won enough of it to give themselves platforms to play off.
Our scrum in those years was a good scrum, but it was not the power unit the current Springbok pack is. What won us three Tests in a row against New Zealand that season was our ability to steal their ball, and to maul very effectively off our own. Set piece, in other words, and the decisions that came off it.
And what did the All Blacks do? They regrouped. Their management looked at what had beaten them, fixed it, and went on to win the next two World Cups. I mention this not to be nostalgic but because the shape of it is so familiar. The Springboks beat them at set piece and on the scoreboard, and the All Blacks were not nearly as far away as three straight defeats suggested.
Back to the present.
Front-ball handling is thrower and lifter timing. Middle-ball security against a side that reads the middle is call recognition and a decision about when to go long. Neither requires new players. A rugby country with New Zealand’s depth of lineout knowledge fixes both in a training block.
On the other side of the ball, the maul is the Springboks’ try engine and it delivered again: three maul tries and a penalty try, and five tries from the eleven lineouts they threw inside the New Zealand 22. If you are ever preparing a side to play them, know that eleven of those twelve attacking throws were won cleanly. The contest is in the maul after the catch, not in the air.
Ellis Park was the All Black breakdown at its best. It never happened again.
The first Test at Ellis Park was one of the great breakdown performances. New Zealand won eighteen turnovers: six jackals from eight attempts, six tackle turnovers, more at the ruck. South Africa’s cleanout that day failed eight times, and the Springbok attack coughed up 22 turnovers in the match, seven of them inside the New Zealand 22. South Africa led 16–12 early in the second half and lost 33–16.
A week later New Zealand won one turnover. One. They did not attempt a single jackal in Cape Town. South Africa did not fail a single clear out in 192 arrivals at the ruck. Across the last three Tests combined New Zealand won 19 turnovers, fewer than they had won in the first eighty minutes.
I have been in a Springbok camp on the Monday after a breakdown like Ellis Park, and I can tell you what that week looks like. I cannot tell you from the outside exactly what they changed. What I can tell you is that in the two Tests South Africa won most comfortably, their cleanout failed once in 407 arrivals. Once.
sand_man
Honorary Master
continued......
The other half of the story is what happened to New Zealand’s own ruck. They lost 31 of their 372 rucks in the series, about one in twelve, when their normal rate this year has been closer to one in fifty. Their ruck ball was roughly half a second slower than usual, every ruck, for four weeks, against a defence that lives on slow ball. Nine of their turnovers were simply ball lost at the ruck or maul.
The high ball: one weapon, and one man carrying half the misses.
South Africa put up 47 contestable kicks in the series and either got the ball back or forced an error from the catcher on twenty of them, 43%, roughly double what they had been managing earlier in the year. The bomb, the high hanging kick from the fly-half, was the weapon: seven of ten were collected by a South African, five by Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu himself. The box kick from the scrum-half was more of a mixed bag: Cobus Reinach got 7 of his 14 back, the other two scrum-halves 6 of 23 between them.
On the New Zealand side, the problem was concentrated. They dropped 8 of 23 defensive catches, and Will Jordan, brilliant with ball in hand all series, accounted for four of the eight. They actually got more bodies into the air than South Africa did (38 aerial contests to 21). They just came down without the ball more often.
Where the Springboks leaked, because they did.
I do not want this to read as if South Africa were flawless, because they were not, and the places they leaked are exactly the places a smart opponent will go in November.
Their tackling was below their own standard: 81% completion (641 of 787) against a norm closer to 86%, and 129 missed tackles in four Tests. Fifty-four of those came from a step and fifty-four from being bumped off, so they were beaten by footwork as often as by power. Out wide they missed 23% of their edge tackles, and once the line was broken they missed 37% of their cover tackles, three times their usual rate.
Their restart game was, frankly, poor. Of the 21 restarts they kicked, seven were their own error. Of nine short restarts, five were errors and two were retained, one of which led straight to Jesse Kriel’s try in the third Test. Receiving, they fumbled nine of 37 restart catches. New Zealand kicked 26 restarts without a single error.
And there were the cards. Four yellows, three of them for professional fouls, and in the two card windows where the game was still alive they conceded seven points each time. Two of those cards came 97 seconds apart at Ellis Park with the score at 16–19.
Now the caveat, and it is an important one, because the numbers on their own would mislead you here. The Springboks defend with a vicious level of line speed and a level of aggression in the tackle that is unlike anything else in the game, and a written piece cannot show you the ferocity of those collisions or the G-forces the players are absorbing on both sides of them.
That approach carries risk by design.
You cannot have that kind of line speed in your DNA and not concede the odd step on the edge or the odd missed cover tackle when the line has already been broken. I have no inside knowledge of how the Springbok brains trust thinks about this, but I would be very surprised if they were not perfectly happy to trade a handful of misses for the pressure that speed and intensity puts on every attacking decision an opponent makes. So the missed-tackle numbers are what they are, and they are worth knowing, but they are not a criticism. They are the price of the way the Boks choose to defend, and the way they choose to defend is a large part of why they are the best team in the world.
None of that stopped them winning, because what they did well was worth more than what they did badly. It is still worth saying plainly: the best team in the world was not the best defensive team in this series, and the team that lost 3–1 kicked its restarts better, kept its collision discipline better (two high- tackle penalties and one card in four Tests), and scored more tries.
So how do you score more tries and lose the series?
Because tries are one currency and this series was settled in another.
New Zealand’s attack converted its chances better. But South Africa created more chances (38 visits to the 22 against 32), took 27 points from the tee that New Zealand never attempted, won 14 scrum penalties to seven, scored three maul tries and a penalty try, got the ball back from 43% of their high kicks, and turned a breakdown that had humiliated them at Ellis Park into one that gave up a single turnover in Cape Town.
The All Blacks were not out-played in the way that phrase usually gets used after a 3–1 defeat. They were out-decided and out-set-pieced. Those are different problems, and they are the more fixable kind.
Why New Zealand will be quietly confident, and why they should be.
Here is the list of what beat them. A defensive scrum on the opposition feed: a technical and selection question. A lineout with nine lost throws and two clear mechanical causes. Own-half penalties, twenty of thirty from three offences. A high-ball catch where one player carried half the failures. And a decision, taken four Tests running, not to kick at goal.
None of that is a talent gap. Every item on it is coachable, and most of it is coachable quickly. A country that produces lineout forwards and front rows the way New Zealand does will not need a year to fix a front-ball call or a defensive scrum. If they fix the set piece and change their mind about the tee, the ten-point gap over four Tests closes a lot faster than people expect.
What is harder, and I say this with respect, is the other thing. Becoming battle-hardened to the Springboks means being able to stay in the fight when South Africa turn a Test into the kind of Test they want: scrum, maul, high ball, and three points every time you make a mistake in your own half.
That is not toughness in the abstract. It is a front row that holds, a lineout that does not drop front ball, a breakdown that keeps its ball when the cleanout gets stood up, and a captain and a ten who look at a kickable penalty in the 50th minute of a five-point game and take the three.
Easier said than done. South Africa have spent the best part of a decade building that game and have a squad that has won under exactly that pressure. You do not become hardened to it by deciding to be. You become hardened to it by losing a few of these and working out why, which is precisely what the All Blacks of 2009 did.
For South Africa the lesson runs the other way, and they will know it. They won three Tests against a side that scored more tries than they did, and they won them with the parts of their game that have always been theirs. That is a strength and a warning in the same breath.
The tackle completion, the cover defence, the restarts and the professional fouls are the things I would be thinking about in the Springbok camp, because those are what turn a 90% goal-kicker and a dominant scrum into a loss on the day the set piece has an off day. Ellis Park is what that looks like: 22 turnovers, seven lost 22 entries, two cards, and the best scrum in the world could not save them.
The rivalry lived up to its name.
From a rugby purist’s point of view this was a thrilling series, and I think the reason it was thrilling is exactly the contradiction I started with. The better attacking side lost. The better set-piece side won. Two of the four Tests were decided by seven points or fewer, and every one of them turned on something you could name: a lineout steal, a scrum penalty, a retained restart, a clean out that held.
South Africa are the best team in the world and they proved it. New Zealand are not far behind, and the things they are behind on are the things a rugby-rich country fixes. A year out from a World Cup, that is about as interesting a place as this rivalry has been for a long time.
GG
The other half of the story is what happened to New Zealand’s own ruck. They lost 31 of their 372 rucks in the series, about one in twelve, when their normal rate this year has been closer to one in fifty. Their ruck ball was roughly half a second slower than usual, every ruck, for four weeks, against a defence that lives on slow ball. Nine of their turnovers were simply ball lost at the ruck or maul.
The high ball: one weapon, and one man carrying half the misses.
South Africa put up 47 contestable kicks in the series and either got the ball back or forced an error from the catcher on twenty of them, 43%, roughly double what they had been managing earlier in the year. The bomb, the high hanging kick from the fly-half, was the weapon: seven of ten were collected by a South African, five by Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu himself. The box kick from the scrum-half was more of a mixed bag: Cobus Reinach got 7 of his 14 back, the other two scrum-halves 6 of 23 between them.
On the New Zealand side, the problem was concentrated. They dropped 8 of 23 defensive catches, and Will Jordan, brilliant with ball in hand all series, accounted for four of the eight. They actually got more bodies into the air than South Africa did (38 aerial contests to 21). They just came down without the ball more often.
Where the Springboks leaked, because they did.
I do not want this to read as if South Africa were flawless, because they were not, and the places they leaked are exactly the places a smart opponent will go in November.
Their tackling was below their own standard: 81% completion (641 of 787) against a norm closer to 86%, and 129 missed tackles in four Tests. Fifty-four of those came from a step and fifty-four from being bumped off, so they were beaten by footwork as often as by power. Out wide they missed 23% of their edge tackles, and once the line was broken they missed 37% of their cover tackles, three times their usual rate.
Their restart game was, frankly, poor. Of the 21 restarts they kicked, seven were their own error. Of nine short restarts, five were errors and two were retained, one of which led straight to Jesse Kriel’s try in the third Test. Receiving, they fumbled nine of 37 restart catches. New Zealand kicked 26 restarts without a single error.
And there were the cards. Four yellows, three of them for professional fouls, and in the two card windows where the game was still alive they conceded seven points each time. Two of those cards came 97 seconds apart at Ellis Park with the score at 16–19.
Now the caveat, and it is an important one, because the numbers on their own would mislead you here. The Springboks defend with a vicious level of line speed and a level of aggression in the tackle that is unlike anything else in the game, and a written piece cannot show you the ferocity of those collisions or the G-forces the players are absorbing on both sides of them.
That approach carries risk by design.
You cannot have that kind of line speed in your DNA and not concede the odd step on the edge or the odd missed cover tackle when the line has already been broken. I have no inside knowledge of how the Springbok brains trust thinks about this, but I would be very surprised if they were not perfectly happy to trade a handful of misses for the pressure that speed and intensity puts on every attacking decision an opponent makes. So the missed-tackle numbers are what they are, and they are worth knowing, but they are not a criticism. They are the price of the way the Boks choose to defend, and the way they choose to defend is a large part of why they are the best team in the world.
None of that stopped them winning, because what they did well was worth more than what they did badly. It is still worth saying plainly: the best team in the world was not the best defensive team in this series, and the team that lost 3–1 kicked its restarts better, kept its collision discipline better (two high- tackle penalties and one card in four Tests), and scored more tries.
So how do you score more tries and lose the series?
Because tries are one currency and this series was settled in another.
New Zealand’s attack converted its chances better. But South Africa created more chances (38 visits to the 22 against 32), took 27 points from the tee that New Zealand never attempted, won 14 scrum penalties to seven, scored three maul tries and a penalty try, got the ball back from 43% of their high kicks, and turned a breakdown that had humiliated them at Ellis Park into one that gave up a single turnover in Cape Town.
The All Blacks were not out-played in the way that phrase usually gets used after a 3–1 defeat. They were out-decided and out-set-pieced. Those are different problems, and they are the more fixable kind.
Why New Zealand will be quietly confident, and why they should be.
Here is the list of what beat them. A defensive scrum on the opposition feed: a technical and selection question. A lineout with nine lost throws and two clear mechanical causes. Own-half penalties, twenty of thirty from three offences. A high-ball catch where one player carried half the failures. And a decision, taken four Tests running, not to kick at goal.
None of that is a talent gap. Every item on it is coachable, and most of it is coachable quickly. A country that produces lineout forwards and front rows the way New Zealand does will not need a year to fix a front-ball call or a defensive scrum. If they fix the set piece and change their mind about the tee, the ten-point gap over four Tests closes a lot faster than people expect.
What is harder, and I say this with respect, is the other thing. Becoming battle-hardened to the Springboks means being able to stay in the fight when South Africa turn a Test into the kind of Test they want: scrum, maul, high ball, and three points every time you make a mistake in your own half.
That is not toughness in the abstract. It is a front row that holds, a lineout that does not drop front ball, a breakdown that keeps its ball when the cleanout gets stood up, and a captain and a ten who look at a kickable penalty in the 50th minute of a five-point game and take the three.
Easier said than done. South Africa have spent the best part of a decade building that game and have a squad that has won under exactly that pressure. You do not become hardened to it by deciding to be. You become hardened to it by losing a few of these and working out why, which is precisely what the All Blacks of 2009 did.
For South Africa the lesson runs the other way, and they will know it. They won three Tests against a side that scored more tries than they did, and they won them with the parts of their game that have always been theirs. That is a strength and a warning in the same breath.
The tackle completion, the cover defence, the restarts and the professional fouls are the things I would be thinking about in the Springbok camp, because those are what turn a 90% goal-kicker and a dominant scrum into a loss on the day the set piece has an off day. Ellis Park is what that looks like: 22 turnovers, seven lost 22 entries, two cards, and the best scrum in the world could not save them.
The rivalry lived up to its name.
From a rugby purist’s point of view this was a thrilling series, and I think the reason it was thrilling is exactly the contradiction I started with. The better attacking side lost. The better set-piece side won. Two of the four Tests were decided by seven points or fewer, and every one of them turned on something you could name: a lineout steal, a scrum penalty, a retained restart, a clean out that held.
South Africa are the best team in the world and they proved it. New Zealand are not far behind, and the things they are behind on are the things a rugby-rich country fixes. A year out from a World Cup, that is about as interesting a place as this rivalry has been for a long time.
GG
Heisenborg
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Incorrect
Boks vs Aus is next weekend my bra (Sunday, 27 September).
netstrider
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I nearly started an actual rugby thread.
Werner1975
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Yes but the British, French and Irish internationals will also be on test duty, so it should even out.
For the Champions and Challenge cup probably. The URC maybe not so much. The Irish, Welsh, Scottish and Italian teams would have rested players and their national teams might let them warm up in URC a bit.
Will see next week how the teams look.
I'm really excited for the URC to start up again.
MuterOfWorlds
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Jeez, Gary Gold sure can drop a ton of horse manure these days, good lord.
Which part did you think was crap?
I found his analysis quite interesting and relevant.