Those who treated the installation of the Springboks as Rugby Championship titleholders in waiting with wariness after the opening game will be cringing if they’ve seen some of the overseas headlines since the latest win over the Wallabies in Perth.
“‘Genius’ Erasmus has Springboks soaring towards a third World Cup in a row” was the headline on the online version of Stuart Barnes’ column in London’s Sunday Times. Talk about placing the pressure on the reigning champions. Australia 2027 is still three years away and lots can happen in that time.
Only New Zealand have ever sustained top form over the length of a four-year World Cup cycle, and even they only got it right once by sustaining it to the global title itself (2015). The All Blacks did win the World Cup in 2011, but that was two years after they’d effectively been whitewashed 3-0 by the Boks en route to the South Africans winning the 2009 Tri-Nations.
That year of dominance from the Boks is a good example of peaking too far out from the World Cup and another is 1998, when Nick Mallett’s team went through the Tri-Nations unbeaten. A year later that momentum was lost and the Boks did well to recover from a slump in the initial part of 1999 to finish third at the RWC.
It was a different era but it is still a salient pointer on what current Bok coach Rassie Erasmus is doing right. Mallett will tell you now that if he has a regret from his stint as national coach it will be that he didn’t back his gut on the 1998 end of year tour. He knew his players were tired but despite having a talented backup group he persisted with his first choices in the quest to achieve a Grand Slam and break a world record for consecutive wins.
Had he selected the likes of Robbie Fleck, among others, in the lesser internationals he would have kept his top guns fresh for the toughest game of the tour against England. Players who ended up featuring in the following year’s World Cup would also have gained more international experience.
Build experience
Winning games in the here and now should not be sacrificed to the altar of the Webb Ellis trophy. You are always slave to fate and misfortune, with refereeing errors and freaky contributions from opposing players among the things that can trip you up in a play-off game. But what you can do is control the controllables and thus give yourself the best possible chance. Which is what Erasmus is doing with a selection policy that some felt was risky before Perth but is now being universally greeted as a stroke of genius.
In making 10 changes and a positional switch from the side that won in Brisbane it wasn’t the first time that Erasmus has done that. You could go back to the third game against England in his first series to the first time he showed his willingness to experiment and build experience by mixing up his selections.
The Boks lost that game in Cape Town but it was a dead rubber. They lost again when he chose 14 new caps in the middle game of the 2022 series against Wales, but won comfortably in Johannesburg and Pretoria respectively when he effectively went second string for games against the Wallabies in the 2019 and 2023 World Cup years.
But there is a big difference between experimenting on the highveld, where the Aussies never win, and doing it in their country. Which is why the 30-12 win justifies the hype even though it was far from a flawless performance.
Not only were the Boks trying out the next layer of players, there were levelling factors such as the weather and the uncontested scrums in the second half that made the performance even more special.
Australia might only be ninth on the world rankings but beating them in Australia is still an achievement and the pressure would have been a good experience for the relative newcomers. With Erasmus likely to continue with this policy into the later stages of the Championship, when the Boks play Argentina, he is building a base that will make it much less of an issue if it is found by the time 2027 arrives that an uncomfortably large number of players have gone over the hill.
By building depth in the way he is, Erasmus is ensuring that what can be controlled is controlled. It makes it hard to disagree with the headlines too — it may be too early to talk about favourites, but the Boks are certainly positioning themselves for a strong challenge for a three-peat.
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