Captain30,741 posts
28 Sept 2021, 11:14
#1
28 Sept 2021, 11:14#1
Another good article by Rich
Kwagga Smith says the Springboks will leave nothing on the field in their final test of what has been a busy return to play southern hemisphere season for the world champions but a proper judgement on where his team are heading lies 12 months beyond that.
Saturday’s return game against the All Blacks on the Gold Coast is the fourth in four weeks where the Boks have played tough games against Australia and New Zealand respectively. It is unprecedented for that to happen consecutively, without at least one break in between the sequence. It also comes at the end of a six week stay in Australia as they had to quarantine for two weeks before the start of this leg of their Castle Lager Rugby Championship campaign.
Before that they were isolating in Gqeberha, and before that was the British and Irish Lions series where the Covid protocols and the isolation from the rest of society was particularly harsh. And where in a spiteful, win at all costs series they had to dig particularly deep both emotionally and physically to beat the composite Home Union team in their first real international rugby contact in 20 months.
A BLOW OUT WOULD BE UNDERSTANDABLE NOW
Add all of that together, plus the emotional blow of losing so late in the landmark 100th test against their fiercest rivals in Townsville last weekend, and it becomes entirely possible there could be a big blow-out in this return clash against the Kiwis.
And it does beg the question on how the Boks should approach it - yes, you always want to beat the All Blacks if you can, but there have also been players on tour that haven’t been involved at all on the playing side and deserve a chance to get some game time. Giving them a game might also circumvent the “one foot on the plane home” syndrome that is almost inevitable at the end of a tour of duty that has been as taxing and challenging as this one has been.
When they get back to South Africa the Boks have a much needed fortnight at home and then a two week camp, understood to be most likely in France, to get around the UK quarantining requirements before their end of year tour starts. A tour that will be as momentous and tough as what has gone before as it will feature a clash at Twickenham with what should be a vengeful England team after what happened to them in the 2019 World Cup final.
It just doesn’t stop for the Boks in 2021 when it comes to challenges, and that is why it isn’t as odd as it might appear to be given that there have now been three consecutive defeats to suggest the Boks might have already exceeded expectations this year.
Okay, so two consecutive losses to the Wallabies wasn’t expected, but when you consider their long hiatus from international rugby, they really shouldn’t have been expected to beat the Lions, who had not lost a series since 2009.
YOU NEED TO PLAY TO GROW
And for all the pontificating of the likes of legendary former All Black skipper Sean Fitzpatrick and others who have a lot to say about the Boks but completely ignore the unprecedented times we live in and therefore the unprecedented challenges that are faced, it is a win for them that when they finally got to play their fiercest rivals again it was a game that could have gone either way.
Fitzpatrick said before this past weekend’s game that the Boks have not grown since the World Cup, but where would the All Blacks be now if they had not played for 20 months? When they started their post World Cup era at a stage when South African players had only just started to get back onto the playing field after being locked down, they lost to Argentina. Kiwis were calling for the head of new coach Ian Foster.
The All Blacks have grown since then, both in their playing and in their resource depth, but that’s because they’ve been playing. You have to play to grow, and the Boks did not play at all aside from one test against Georgia between the World Cup final and the must win series against the Lions. They had no option but to go with the players who’d won the World Cup and a hard core version of the game that won them the Webb Ellis trophy.
Where Bok coach Jacques Nienaber may have made a mistake was in not mixing up his selections for the second match against Argentina in the same way that he did for the first test against those opponents. Perhaps there could have been a bit of mix and match in the games against Australia too.
But there really hasn’t been much chance for the Boks to grow through experimentation since the hard part of the international season started with the first test against the Lions in late July - indeed, it started with the SA A game 10 days before that - as they have been in a pressured, must win environment the whole way. Four games against Australasian opposition in four weeks is an extremely tough ask. At least for New Zealand and Australia, who also didn’t have to do any quarantining, they had the Pumas as the alternative opponent during the sequence.
KIWIS HAD A YEAR START BUT HAVEN'T GONE AHEAD
That the Boks should probably have won in Townsville had they held their nerve in a game where they demonstrated that although they are more than a year behind the Kiwis in terms of post-World Cup development there is still nothing to choose between the teams was a massive positive for them and also a strong statement. At least a strong statement to people who understand what they’ve been through.
That’s why this is probably not a time where it should be necessary to carp on too much about what is obvious, which is that the Boks do need to grow their game a lot more before the next World Cup in France two years from now. It goes without saying too that they need grow their depth in some positions too, particularly flyhalf, where Handre Pollard’s struggle with confidence is currently hamstringing the team a bit and played a part in the Boks not getting over the line against the All Blacks.
RIGHT GAME BUT NEED TO USE BALL BETTER
The contestable kicking game is the right one, particularly against the All Blacks and particularly when you have the likes of Smith and skipper Siya Kolisi in the sublime form they were in this past weekend. What the Boks need to learn to do though is to more with the ball when they get it back from those contestable situations, and again, as was mentioned after the defeat to the Wallabies in Brisbane, there needs to be some thought on appointing a dedicated, specialist attack coach.
Cheslin Kolbe’s X-factor in broken play was missed when the game was close in those last minutes in Townsville, but generally the Bok attacking game and the quality of the back play hasn’t been where it was when Swys de Bruin was the attack coach in 2018.
If that problem can be sorted out then the ruthlessness that the All Black coach spoke about when asked about his impressions on the Bok playing style could be translated into ruthlessness on the scoreboard too. Just a bit more attacking nous and shape could have seen the Boks go more than a score ahead and kill the game, rather than leave it to the fate and the opening that Jordie Barrett was given at the end to win it for his team.
If the Boks are going to head in that direction, if they are going to move away from the rigidity that is most people’s problem with a game plan that does work, and those who keep imploring the Boks to run against the All Blacks need just look at what happens to Australia when they do that, is something we will know this time next year.
It is in the 2022 meetings with the All Blacks and Australia in what will hopefully be a return to normal Rugby Championship fare with home and away tests and no quarantining that we should measure and judge the post-2019 Boks and assess their chances of holding onto the World Cup trophy.
And that's quite a chilling thing to think about for their opponents as if they are behind now, it isn't by a lot. Townsville showed that.
