It is generally agreed that the big Springbok strength is their ability to find ways to win, but winning Saturday’s World Cup final against the All Blacks will require them to stop the habit of trying to find ways to lose.
They are better at the first part than the second, but their habit of conspiring against themselves will sooner or later get them into a hole they can’t get out of. They say cats have nine lives, how many do the Boks have? No South African will want that answer to be provided in Paris in the World Cup decider.
Bok coach Jacques Nienaber said in a television interview just before the kickoff to the semifinal against England that the winner would be the team that played the wet conditions best. His team didn’t appear to listen. It was England who played the better wet weather game by some distance, and the Boks were complicit in making England look really good at it.
When you are playing wet weather rugby you need to simplify things and focus on the basics. Instead, they complicated things at line-out time, which led to dysfunction in that phase. They tried plays that would have required the sort of long range attack they’ve become good at in dry conditions but just aren’t on in the wet.
Of course, England were really good at the kicking game and the aerial skills required. That’s the way they like to play. When they decide they don’t care being labelled boring England, that’s when they are most likely to win.
They stumbled onto that certainty by accident at the start of the tournament. Playing against Argentina, they had Tom Curry red-carded early and were forced to play most of their Pool D encounter with 14 men. Like a soccer team that is forced by a red card to go into ultra-defensive mode and settle for at best a draw, the England team were left with no alternative but to rely almost exclusively on their kicking game.
Admittedly, they didn’t really play anyone in the Pool phase but they did pick up a winning habit, and that did get their confidence up. With their supporters and sections of their media having gone through a horrible sequence where losing was a habit, the end started to justify the means.
When I saw the weather I immediately saw it as a leveller, the sort of day when selecting the strongly built safe under the high ball Freddie Steward would work for England and where the pace of the game would suit them. The Boks needed to be tactically on point, and as Nienaber said, they had to adapt to the conditions.
Instead, the Boks were tactically inept at dealing with the challenge they faced. The Boks are known to be a smart team, but they weren’t smart under the Stade de France lights, and for a long time looked uncomfortable and lacked their usual composure.
On the theme of trying hard to find ways to lose, the selection didn’t help either. For my money, the classy Manie Libbok should always start at flyhalf on a dry day on the basis of what he does for the Bok attacking game and their transitioning from defence to attack.
Everyone lauded Pollard for his penalty kick from halfway against France, but the Boks might not still have been in that game at that point had it not been for how they responded to the three first-half French tries with three tries of their own. Were they tries that would have been scored with a different flyhalf? That is debatable.
But in a wet weather game Pollard had to start, and that call should have been made before kickoff. Maybe the Boks felt such a move wouldn’t have a good look, but it wasn’t a good look to replace Libbok after 30 minutes either. Libbok didn’t do anything wrong, it was just clear that in wet weather it wasn’t going to be his sort of game. The Bok coaches surely knew that before kick off.
They arguably should also have been more aware of the impact of the huge game against France both emotionally and physically on the Bok players. It was clear from the opening minutes that as with Ireland against New Zealand the week before the Boks weren’t as energetic in the early stages as they normally are.
The Boks do have enough depth in their squad to freshen up without weakening the team. It will require a few huge calls, but that aspect needs to be spot on against the All Blacks, who when they do beat SA normally do it off fast tempo and high intensity starts.
They’re in a final on Saturday, they are 80 minutes from making history by retaining the Webb Ellis trophy. This is the culmination of the four-year cycle, and the Bok mental strength gives them a great chance of winning. They can’t though expect to conspire against themselves as they have in the past two matches and continue to get away with it.
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