It is a measure of how far the Springboks have advanced over the past few months that there was some disappointment in their performance after an 11-point win over Ireland in Dublin.
While it is true the Boks were outscored in the second half, they were playing opponents that had only lost twice at home in their previous 25 games. We are also talking about a venue in the Aviva Stadium where the Boks had not won against Ireland since 2012, and who thrashed them 38-3 there in 2017.
Ireland won in Durban the last time the two teams met, which was in the second Test of the series played last July. But then maybe that game did contribute to the way the Boks played, which may have ultimately prevented them from scoring the 20- to 30-point win their dominance of possession should have demanded.
The Boks were beaten up physically at Kings Park 16 months ago. And there were times in their win at the weekend that they looked like they were determined to make a physical point against their opponents.
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They had a huge advantage in the scrums but then overdid it. Their attacking game became predictable like it used to be before Tony Brown got involved, and it was one of the reasons the gutsy but outplayed Irish were able to hang on when the Boks laid siege to their try line for long periods.
Make no mistake, though Ireland got into their half in the last 10 minutes, and mistakes started to give them just a little bit of breathing room, the hosts weren’t going to win the game. You don’t win when you are so dominated in the forward battle, and to me it looked like Ireland, who were stretched like they haven’t been in Dublin in many years, were chasing damage limitation once the physical tone had been set.
The way they were out-scrummed will haunt them, and given how good they’ve been in that department in recent years, it may take them a long time to recover.
The narrative of Bok-Ireland fixtures, which revolved around Ireland being a hoodoo team for the world champions, has changed significantly. As one Ireland rugby writer put it, they were “mullered”.
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And so ends an international season where gear shifts, though not evident in Dublin, became a trend for the Boks, and so did convincing victories. The two-point win over Argentina in London that clinched them the Rugby Championship was the closest the Boks came to losing after they lost the other big attempt to cross a frontier in their international season, that being the game against the All Blacks in Auckland. And that Twickenham game wasn’t nearly as close as that scoreline might indicate.
Yes, there is one more game to go against Wales this week, but the Welsh are so weak that I find it hard to understand why the Boks are messing the South African franchises around, with some of them down to play big games in the United Rugby Championship next weekend, by playing outside the international window.
Perhaps if someone like Ntuthuko Mchunu, the former Sharks prop who has been prevented by injury from making his eagerly awaited debut for the Stormers, gets to play against Wales as his only international outing of the year, then that may be one benefit to be derived from playing in Cardiff.
But I’m not sure it outweighs the damage that the absence of their national players might mean to the chances of the Stormers and the Sharks, for instance, winning their games in Ireland against Munster and Connacht, respectively.
What we know now, though, is that, bar a real miracle from the Welsh, the Boks will complete a second successive unbeaten November tour, something their archrivals from New Zealand have failed to do for a while.
That, like the muted response to a comprehensive win over one of the world’s top teams in the penultimate game, just underlines how far the Boks are ahead of the rest of the world.
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