OZ and nz refs of course lack the moral fibre to be refs. Angus was actually doing quite well but fell apart when the chips were down at the end of the match and did and down under funk..
Ex Super Sport
With Rassie Erasmus’ first season in charge now three matches from completion, the Springboks should have a good idea of what they need to do to become a consistent world beating team - they need to learn how to win matches where they and not the opposition dominate possession.
The complaints about referee Angus Gardner (Oz ref!!) and his Bryce Lawrence-like brain fart (PLEASE NOTE BRYCY!!!!!) at Twickenham from the team’s supporters and other critics are completely justified. Erasmus is quite right - if the Owen Farrell shoulder charge that sparked the controversy was a legitimate tackle, then Super Rugby coaches should be training their teams to do that next season. It’s certainly an effective way of stopping an opponent!
But Erasmus and his team are also realistic enough to know that even if that penalty was awarded and the Boks had kicked it to win the game, the immediate euphoria at getting home with the victory would quickly have been dampened by the knowledge that it was a game that the Boks made heavy weather of.(FAIR ENOUGH)
DOMINATION WITHOUT REWARD
Seldom has a team dominated in the manner that the Boks did in the first half and yet only been down by two points at the break. The England defence was good, and John Mitchell, the latest personality to be snatched away by South African rugby’s brain drain, can take a bow. England’s tactical adjustment in the second half was also astute, so take a bow too Eddie Jones.
But the way the Boks conspired against themselves with rank bad finishing and elementary schoolboy handling errors, and the difficulty they appeared to have in coming up with something inventive to exploit their possession and territorial dominance, is something that preceded Erasmus’ arrival in his dual role as director of rugby and coach.
Indeed, when the Boks were making a mish-mash of their attempts to get the scoreboard moving in the first half in London it was hard not to think back to Allister Coetzee’s last match in charge. It was at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff last December. The Bok forwards smashed the Welsh, and yet somehow the team still lost the game.
At the time in this webspace appeared a piece that suggested it summed up the problems with Coetzee as the Bok coach. How could you lose a game when you’d so comprehensively won the battle for possession?
THE PLAN IS THE RIGHT ONE
In truth though you can’t compare Erasmus to Coetzee, even though right now Erasmus’ record for the year, with defeats now outnumbering victories, isn’t much better than that of his predecessor. In Cardiff last year Coetzee, in expecting the Welsh to run at his team, got the tactics completely wrong. As he did quite frequently.
At Twickenham, the plan was right. The Boks played the game in the right areas of the field. They created opportunities. Plenty of them. It was the execution that was wrong (CLEARLY THE PLAYERS LET DOWN THEIR AUGUST COACH!!!). Just about everything they tried ended up in an error, often unforced, halting the process. True, the lineouts weren’t functioning, and at international level that is an Achilles heel that is difficult to overcome.
But when they scored their most momentous win of the year against the All Blacks in Wellington they didn’t need the ball. They were better off with the opposition having the ball. When the Boks feasted off All Black mistakes, they were clinical in execution and impressive in rounding off. They made their own luck.
When they returned to South Africa to play Australia at the start of the Rugby Championship home leg, the Boks won much more possession, but they weren’t nearly as clinical and efficient. They eventually let the Wallabies come close in a game that the hosts were dominating for most of the first part of it and in which they had plenty of ball to play with.
Erasmus said it afterwards - it was a game where with better finishing in the periods of his team’s ascendancy the Boks could have given the Wallabies “a good hiding”.
Now roll forward to a week later at Loftus. Okay, this is a difficult one, as the Boks actually were good for most of the way in a game where they dominated possession. But the bottom line at the end was that they also didn’t make full use of opportunities, and in the end they were the losers in a game where they’d won the possession battle. They beat the same opponents three weeks earlier playing without the ball.
BOKS ARE MOST DANGEROUS WHEN OPPOSITION HAS THE BALL
`Going back earlier in the year the story was similar - the Boks won more ball than Argentina did in Mendoza but lost the game, and they shaded the forward battle in their loss to the Wallabies too. Even in their wins over England in the home series in June, they sometimes struggled to make it count in those periods when they did have physical and possession ascendancy.
The Boks look their most dangerous at this point when the opposition have the ball and they can bring their rush defensive into play and force mistakes to play off. England never had the ball in the first half in London and it meant the Boks had to make their own play. They fluffed their lines.
You could probably write a book on what it comes down to. Over-anxiousness is certainly a potential factor, and in this particular game the fact that it is being played at the end of a long year could also have played a role. Players are only human, and those who weren’t fatigued might have been rusty after not playing a game since the All Black clash four weeks earlier. Certainly it is a long time since Malcolm Marx has looked so out of touch in almost every aspect of his game and it is hard to blame the mistakes he made on the coaches or any other factor other than himself.
But in the end what it really comes down to is skill levels, something that has been a blight on any Bok progress towards a complete game throughout the post-isolation era. This might sound bizarre, but again it does not come down just to the Springbok coaches, who only have the squad for a small proportion of the year.
The Bok skills looked noticeably improved during the June series and Erasmus commented on it. He thanked the franchise coaches for the work they were doing, and his predecessor Coetzee for suggesting the national coaching indaba in 2016 that was the beginning of the quest to improve the basic core skills of South African players.
Maybe that has gone west now because it is late in the year and it is now a long time on from the off-season, when so much of the work on skills would have been done? Who knows what the truth is, but it is probably fair to say that a lot of the groundwork for next year’s World Cup challenge will be done in the next few months, before the kick-off to the new season, and Erasmus will need a lot of help from others in the South African rugby system if it is to be got right.
PLENTY TO BE POSITIVE ABOUT
For all that, and disregarding yet another negative result which came about because the Boks conspired against themselves, there is still plenty to be positive about, such as the promise shown by the back three, and the emergence - at last - of a wing pairing that packs both size and pace out wide. Although Erasmus did lament the penalties given away afterwards, there was also good composure shown by the Boks in the period when England finally did get some momentum going for them heading into the last quarter. Some previous Bok teams might have lost it badly from there.
So notwithstanding some of the poor decision making that might have helped make life easier for England, the leadership did come through the test of nerve, it's just a pity the referee didn't allow it to be rounded off with a kick for victory. You can't blame the Boks, and Andre Esterhuizen, for the fact the final attack of the match broke down. Any player would have had the ball knocked out of his hands by that tackle.
Ivan van Zyl was good as the replacement for Faf de Klerk, Embrose Papier was equally good when he came on and a different style was required later in the game, and Damian Willemse, despite one late mistake when he kicked too long, made a solid first start at fullback and was excellent in fielding the high ball.
The lineout was an issue but the scrum was dominant. There are question marks over Duane Vermeulen’s switch of position, and let’s be honest, this was not a great England team that the Boks were facing, but the South Africans do possess a formidable pack. The essentials are there, we know that, and so is the plan. It is the little things that need to come right. This time two years ago those "little things" weren't so little.
