The Springboks were in a similar charitable mood in the last quarter of the final match of their Rugby Championship campaign as they were in their opening game against Australia, but there’s no denying the huge improvements they made in-between those two windows of play.
Although Argentina did score a last-move try at Twickenham to narrow the end margin to two points, it was a comprehensive win for the Boks. In the period where they scored an unanswered 26 points, the Boks were imperious and looked likely to repeat their big margin of victory of the previous week.
That they didn’t extend their lead and instead saw it shrink to the point where the end score was a completely false impression of the game was down to the poor game management that saw the Pumas break the SA momentum with an intercept try.
Cheslin Kolbe effectively did the same thing as Manie Libbok did in Joburg seven weeks earlier. Libbok’s Hail Mary pass had a more damaging impact, with Australia’s Joseph Sua’ali’i accepting a gift that led to the Wallabies scoring an unexpected win. The Bautista Delguy try did not have the same fatal consequences, but the repetition of the mistake made in Joburg was an indication that there are still learnings for this Bok team.
The Boks have swung to a high-risk and high-reward approach as opposed to the low-risk, conservative approach of the past, and that means growing pains will continue to be experienced.
But we saw enough good from the Boks in the championship season to agree they shouldn’t be putting away the flash and veering from their new path. All that is needed in the quest for greater perfection is better game management, meaning that when you are leading the game, you don’t need to behave like you are chasing it and throw loose passes from inside your own half.
Bok coach Rassie Erasmus is busy with a process, and in that sense, what matters most is that there is improvement. Both individually and to the team’s game. While the Bok win in last year’s championship was by a more comfortable log point margin, the growth in the Bok game has been accelerated to a new level this year.
Whereas in 2024 the Boks celebrated narrow home wins over the All Blacks, this time around they were abjectly disappointed at their failure to get over the line away at Eden Park and then made a massive improvement the following week by thrashing those opponents by 33 points. In a game away from home!
Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu’s brilliant record-breaking display in Durban was the standout individual performance from players introduced in the past two years, but he isn’t alone — Ethan Hooker and Jan-Hendrik Wessels have established themselves as top international performers, and Canan Moodie is now showing that he is a generational player in the same way as Feinberg-Mngomezulu and Damian Willemse are.
Others, such as Ruan Nortjé, have made further strides from their debut international seasons, and even though he wasn’t with the squad at the end of the competition, you can add wing Edwill van der Merwe to that list too.
The frightening thing for future opponents is that this Bok team has still to produce a complete 80-minute performance, with their execution tending to be off in the early stages of many games. But when they have got the momentum, the synthesis of the forwards and backs on attack has removed any lingering doubts about the effectiveness of attack coach Tony Brown’s innovations.
Their blip at the start meant they ended on the same number of log points as New Zealand, but the Boks ended as by far the competition’s most dominant team, and we will wait now until the November tour to see if that domination of the south can be replicated in the north.
France will be a big challenge in Paris, but what is for certain is the Boks possess far more threats and are a lot more adaptable and dangerous as a team than they were 12 months ago.
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