The two top Rugby Championship teams in current global standing produced performances at the weekend that were a step down from two weeks ago, but there’s more reason for the All Blacks to be concerned — even though they won and the Springboks lost.
There was an uncanny similarity in the game in Sydney, where New Zealand snuck home by just three points against the Wallabies, and the later game in Santiago, where a missed penalty denied the Boks a tight win over Argentina.
In both games the early minutes provided us with evidence of the wide chasm between the top two and the bottom two. It was as if they carried the intensity of their meetings on SA soil over into these games, and initially their opponents just weren’t able to live with them.
But then the All Blacks got seduced by the ease with which they were hammering the Wallabies, and made the mistake of chasing a landslide winning margin. They became rushed and sloppy, and they didn’t bring the same intensity to their defensive game that they did to their clashes with the Boks. For the simple reason that they didn’t need to.
Or at least that was how it appeared in the initial parts of the Wallaby fightback. By the end the All Blacks were hanging on and learnt the valuable lesson that the Boks learnt later on, which is that sometimes when you cede momentum to your opponents it can snowball.
The Santiago game was almost a mirror image initially of the one in Sydney, with one significant difference — whereas the All Blacks were profiting from some pretty abject play from the Australians, the Boks were playing a highly impressive tempo game that stunned their opponents and had them floundering.
If anyone needs a 15-minute video segment of where the Boks are wanting to head with the new dynamic introduced by attack coach Tony Brown, that was the first quarter hour that needs to be put on show. It was sublime, but knowing the game was being played in 36°C heat, I have to admit I had misgivings. And even before the Pumas scored I was telling mates about my concern the Boks might run themselves off their own feet.
In the end the Boks should feel thankful for that initial 17-point burst, but there again maybe they wouldn’t have struggled so much with the Pumas’ attacking game later in the first half if they’d had a more measured start. The Boks didn’t exactly run themselves off their own feet, for they did come back strongly in the second half, which they dominated, and should still have won.
But there was a similar element to what happened to them as to what happened to the All Blacks — they got seduced by the ease with which they were getting through the Argentina defence system. And the Pumas under the coaching of Felipe Contemponi are far more dangerous than the Wallabies. In front of their own fans it has always been dangerous to let them into the game, but even more so now.
Once the Pumas scored their first try, the noise levels of the support were raised, and the adrenaline took hold. In no time at all, and quite unbelievably if you consider how good the Boks are defensively, they’d scored four consecutive tries and conceded 26 unanswered points.
When did that last happen to the Boks? It hasn’t in the Rassie Erasmus era, but the narrative afterwards, had Manie Libbok nailed his attempted winning kick, would have been that it is a measure of Bok growth that they could concede 26 points so quickly and still win.
South Africans will be disappointed, but there was context to the loss that ensures it shouldn’t be seen as a train smash, as well as historic precedent. In 2009 when the Boks were the dominant team in the Tri-Nations, they lost unexpectedly to the Wallabies in the penultimate game. No-one remembers that now, and no-one will remember Santiago if the Boks respond in Mbombela.
The context is the growing pains the Boks are still going through and which cost them the result in this game. For the All Blacks it is different in that their game was just a microcosm of a much wider problem they face with having Australia as their main measuring stick in Super Rugby.
While the Aussie commentators waxed lyrical about the quality of the game, it wasn’t really any great shakes as a Test match. It was a typical Antipodean derby, meaning too loose. In Super Rugby the Aussie teams occasionally challenge their Kiwi opponents, but it is invariably complacency and the feeling they can get away with being sloppy, just like the All Blacks in Sydney, that drives the occasional flashes of Aussie competitiveness.
That is a macro scale problem New Zealand has to contend with, whereas what tripped up the Boks is a more micro, short term stumbling block they will outgrow. And which should be forgotten after we’ve watched another 80 minutes between the teams in Mbombela.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.