France have lost several key players to injury but they will have the weather on their side when they clash with the Springboks on Saturday
RUGBY:Barney Spender
HISTORY is overwhelmingly on South Africa’s side for the first Test against France in Bordeaux on Saturday, but the weather isn’t. It was always going to be a shock to the system moving from the southern hemisphere humidity of Buenos Aires to a northern hemisphere winter, but as with the standard of the opposition, it’s one thing to anticipate adversity, another to cope with it.
Snow flakes were dancing when the squad arrived in Paris on Monday, and on Tuesday night in Lyons the heavens opened in almost African fashion. Unfortunately the rain was not accompanied by Africa’s largely temperate climate. But the Boks won 36-20 and Wayne Fyvie’s dirt trackers went some way to expunging the memory of a disjointed performance against the French Barbarians in Brive.
But both games revealed the problem of coming to terms with an unfamiliar leather ball and the numbing effects of the weather on handling ability. The Boks constantly lost the ball going forward because it was a) more slippery than they were used to and b) colder than they were used to. If the Test side make the same errors on Saturday the tour could lurch into crisis with a first Test defeat.
But there are solid reasons to believe that South Africa will start favourites against the Tricolors. To deal with history first, the overall record between the sides is 14 wins for the Boks against five for the French, with a remarkable five draws. France have won only once on home soil, that being the last time the teams met in Paris in October 1992. Otherwise South Africa have won seven out of eight.
Bordeaux is another famous link to past encounters. In 1913 South Africa won 38-5 in the wine capital to record their highest points difference against the Tricolors.
Another interesting parallel is the two-Test tour, which in 1992 under Naas Botha was shared 1-1. Botha himself was the catalyst for an against-the-odds first Test win in Lyons, kicking his side to a 28-15 victory before the French got spectacular revenge with a 29-16 win in Paris a week later.
The way things are going at the moment Andre Markgraaff would give his eye teeth for a kicker of Botha’s ability, even if it would totally disrupt the pattern he has painstakingly put together on this tour. Markgraaff has said publicly that he intends his team to win Tests by scoring tries, but on foreign soil, in extremely foreign conditions it would seem like carelessness if the Boks could not fall back on place kicking to win in extremis.
For the Test, in addition to history, the Boks have a few playing matters on their side as well. Firstly Markgraaff must be hugging himself with glee over being able to select the same team for three Tests in a row. By contrast Jean-Claude Skrela has had to mix and match his team due to injury.
Markgraaff has been very careful not to gloat and has spent some time talking up the abilities of the new players, but even a country as filled with backline talent as France must struggle to replace a great pair of wings like Phillipe Saint-Andr and Emile N’tamack.
Markgraaff said in the week that the game is won and lost before it reaches the wings, but these two are living proof of the limited truth contained in that opinion. In 1994 it was Saint-Andr who, in the dying moments of the 1994 Test against the All Blacks in Auckland sparked the so-called “try from the end of the earth” which seized victory and a series win in New Zealand.
As for N’tamack, it was his try in the dying minutes of the World Cup match in Pretoria which beat Scotland 22-19 and allowed France to avoid the All Blacks in the quarter- finals. N’tamack and Saint-Andr will be replaced by Richard Dourthe, a converted centre, and David Berty, the Toulouse player who is known in France for his inability to translate club form to Test form.
The other problem for the French is at lock where the great Olivier Roumat and the rumbustious Olivier Merle are unfit and replaced by Fabien Pelous and Hugues Miorin. The prodigious form of Mark Andrews and Kobus Wiese would suggest an edge for the tourists both in the scrums and lineouts and, perhaps crucially, in the rucks and mauls from which Markgraaff wishes to build his game plan.
The Barbarians were very successful in preventing the Boks from getting quick ball from these breakdown situations, not least because the referee allowed them to live offside and come over the top. The Boks must hope for a better application of the laws on Saturday, although they should be able to gain confidence by looking back on the Puma Tests where Gary Teichmann did not allow spoiling tactics to affect his outlook on how to win the game.
It is natural for South Africans to be pessimistic about their ability to beat good teams like France, doubly so in tour, but there is enough character in this Springbok team to overcome whatever odds they might mentally have stacked against themselves. Expect a frustrating, but ultimately successful campaign to trample out the vintage in Bordeaux.