Most South Africans don’t like Eddie Jones and he’s not loved by the English media but the Springboks should take Saturday’s defeat at Twickenham on the chin and admit this was one occasion where they were outsmarted by one of the wiliest foxes in the business.
The match could have gone either way and the Boks would have ended the game feeling they should have won it. They did leave too many points on the table, too many scoring opportunities were wasted.
But that they didn’t win was also down to the England coach’s cunning, something he telegraphed in the build-up week by likening the Boks to George Foreman. The message was that the big hitter needed to be neutralised by guile in the way that Muhammad Ali did to Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire in 1974.
We shouldn’t forget that Jones has coached Australia. That nation has an inflated win record against the Boks in the post-isolation era precisely because they’ve done what Jones was talking about England doing — outsmarting their opponents.
Which is something England would find more difficult to do than the Wallabies would just because their DNA has more similarities to SA’s than Australia’s. If SA is the foremost rugby nation when it comes to forward play right now, then England probably comes second, and when they have been successful it has invariably been built around the same ingredients that have underpinned Bok success.
My first moment of doubt about the Boks winning came in a television interview Jones did before the game. He had a confident, knowing smile on his face when he said: “Sometimes a strength can be a weakness”.
Those words proved prophetic. The Boks did get the better of the England scrum in the end, but initially they struggled because of technical issues at the engagement. It was the sort of thing we see happen to the Boks in games against Australia. Those early scrums which ended up in first a free kick and then two penalties to England were pivotal in preventing the visitors from getting the early momentum that they did in Yokohama.
The line-out also suffered a rare dysfunction in the first half, while Jones’s selection, with the long-levered Freddie Steward again proving England’s man of the match, was spot on when it came to it being geared to blunt the Boks’ aerial threat.
But the real bits of genius came in the variations brought to the England attacking game that enabled them to score two tries off strike or set phase moves. It wasn’t unprecedented this season, and Jones clearly spent a lot of time watching reruns of the Bok defeat to the Wallabies in Brisbane in the Rugby Championship. That was a day they conceded four tries. There were also warning signs that the Bok defence could be vulnerable at the back in the previous game against Scotland.
Adding all these things together meant the main SA strengths were blunted at the outset and it prevented them from getting into the game while England took a handy lead. The slow poison approach of coach Jacques Nienaber did work if you consider how dominant the Boks were in the second half, but the bottom line was that they were left with too much to do because of their slow start.
And that’s something that needs to be looked at, the Boks have been behind in a lot of games at halftime in 2021 and come back to win. It happened twice against the British & Irish Lions, in the win against New Zealand and in the first two games of this tour.
The positive for the Boks is that what has gone wrong for them is easily identifiable and easy to work on. Though it was disappointing, the Twickenham result was far from a disaster for the Boks and certainly didn’t hurt their chances of being successful at the next World Cup.
Jones was spot on with his post-match comment that the game was not about redressing what happened in Yokohama but a one-off between the No 1 and No 3 teams in the world. That is the way it will remain for now, with the All Blacks’ loss to France meaning the Boks end the year as the world’s No 1 team, and deservedly so.
The way the forwards took control in the second half confirmed the status of the Bok unit as the best pack in the game, and if you have that as your foundation two years out from a World Cup then you are in a good place.
What the Boks need to do is add other weapons to their arsenal so that they can be better at converting their forward dominance into points than they are now. Twickenham was a reminder that working the scoreboard in increments of seven is always better than doing it in threes.
The appointment of a dedicated, heavyweight attack coach should be part of the Bok agenda between now and the resumption of international battle next July.
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