There were many impressive moments from the Springboks in the 61-7 regulation win over Japan, but the abiding image for me wasn’t so much what happened on the Wembley field but the television cameras picking up Handré Pollard watching from the stands.
The Boks play one of their biggest games of their international year this week against a France team that will be out for revenge for what happened at the same Paris venue at the 2023 World Cup. It was a Pollard clutch kick that won it for the Boks that night, but there must be some debate about whether the double RWC winner will be involved at all this time.
It is likely to be a close game, so I’d back him for a bench role so he can be used to kick a crucial late goal that requires his icy nerve, but after playing four successive games for the Boks in the No 10 jersey, Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu has surely nailed down his right to be considered the first-choice flyhalf.
He was used sparingly in the earlier parts of the southern hemisphere international season, but he has now shown the world what so many who watched him play locally already knew — he is a once-in-a-generation player.
He is also the player who can make the biggest point of difference for the Boks in big games, in the sense of propelling them onto a different stratosphere as an attacking team. There have been few fly-halves with his ability to have the initial line of defenders focus intensely on what he does with ball in hand while at the same time knowing that a millisecond later he might have transferred the pressure onto the fullbacks and wings by kicking into space.
Often it is he himself who arrives at the ball first, before teammates and the opposition players, as we saw in Durban when he changed the whole momentum of the penultimate Rugby Championship game against Argentina. There are often comparisons between Feinberg-Mngomezulu and Dan Carter, but I can’t remember Carter being quite as devastating as an individual attacking force.
Flyhalves aren’t often known as try scorers themselves, but his hat-trick of tries against Argentina followed a hat-trick against Connacht for the Stormers in April, and he was on the board with two more well-taken tries of his own against Japan. In the break between the championship and the start of this tour, Feinberg-Mngomezulu was in similar match-winning form for the Stormers.
The reason he did not feature so much before he wore the No 10 jersey in the seismic win over New Zealand in Wellington was because the Bok coaches were working on his game management and connectedness with the players around him. Rassie Erasmus and Tony Brown knew what a talent they had in their ranks but felt he needed to make adjustments that suited the team plan.
He has now done that, and his control of the game against Japan in the wet should have been as big a talking point afterwards as his brace of tries. He was the top performer in carries, metres made and defenders beaten, and also has field kicking skills on par with, if not even better than, Pollard’s.
While Pollard is Mr Steadiness and can be relied on to be unflustered and clinical and yet maybe just a little bit too deep-lying to bring out the best in his team’s attack, and Manie Libbok has distribution skills par excellence but has a history of sometimes balancing out the good with costly errors, Feinberg-Mngomezulu is the all-rounder. He has everything.
Japan coach Eddie Jones said after Wembley: “He’s got seriously quick feet and a fantastic fend. Give him half an opportunity and he’s gone. That gives SA a different threat.”
Indeed, an already impressive arsenal of threats is now co-ordinated by the most gifted flyhalf of this era. You can never predict what Rassie will do, but the smart money should be on Feinberg-Mngomezulu getting more time in the saddle so he can develop into a habitual match winner.
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