Andy Capostagno Rugby
Times have changed. In 1995 the newly crowned world champion Springboks played Wales at Ellis Park. You may remember the game.
Gary Teichmann, unluckily overlooked for the World Cup, made his debut at eighth man and scored a try. Robbie Kempson, a young and promising prop forward from Natal, sat on the bench.
Wales were about as strong as they could be, which is to say not very, and the final score was South Africa 40, Wales 11. It was regarded as a drubbing. It was a drubbing.
Three years later Teichmann sets a new Springbok record for successive caps and Kempson, a young and promising prop forward from Natal, sits on the bench for the second time in his career.
South Africa beats Wales’ neighbour from across the sea, Ireland, 37-13. It is not regarded as a drubbing. It is regarded as a scandalously poor display by the Springboks against a brave but woefully limited Five Nations outfit. What has changed?
Principally it seems that the Super 12 and the Tri-Nations have increased our expectations.
Springbok coach Nick Mallett expressed the thought this week: “Ireland played well in Bloemfontein, but they rarely put any sustained pressure on our try line. To win an international these days you have to score four or five tries and the way Ireland play I can’t see them doing that. By contrast, although we played poorly, whenever we took the ball through two or three rucks, we scored.”
Well, actually, Stefan Terblanche tended to do the scoring, and to suggest that more than half of his four tries were due to overwhelming Springbok attacks is to be somewhat economical with the truth.
But, then again, any game that can predict scoring through numerical player superiority ahead of individual brilliance isn’t much of a game.
I have suggested in these columns that Terblanche is a limited player. On the basis of his performance in Bloemfontein my stomach may have to prepare itself for yet another portion of humble pie.
But what is engaging about Mallett is his lack of knee-jerk reactions, almost to the extent that a good reflexologist might declare him clinically dead.
Mallett could see, as could we all, that Joost van der Westhuizen had a stinker at the Free State Stadium and Pieter Muller seemed to forget that his primary role in the side must be to give passes and room to the gifted Andr Snyman outside him, not to run straight into the opposition pack in a misguided attempt to prove to the outside world that his neck injury is a thing of the past.
But Mallett suggests the cause rather than the effect of the problem. “Our tight five had a poor game. The Irish front row contains two of the guys who gave us trouble with the British Lions last year, Paul Wallace and Keith Wood.
“What happens is that Wallace gets inside our loose-head [Ollie le Roux] and he and Wood both scrum on the hooker [James Dalton]. The result is that the back row gets tied in, Joost gets poor ball and the backs look poor as a unit.”
Sounds simple, but it’s not so easy to correct, at least not without a little help from the referee.
In Bloemfontein England’s Ed Morrison allowed Wallace to scrum in. It will be interesting to see if Frenchman Joel Dume allows similar latitude in Pretoria this week. If he does not, the foundation of Ireland’s forward effort could be blown away.
In a way, though, it would be more useful for the Boks if Dume allowed a little laissez-faire. Next year is a World Cup year and the boundaries of legality will be stretched during the tournament by a variety of sides.
For all the legend of forward power South Africa carries abroad, there is a certain naivety to that power which can easily be disrupted by a team learned in the arts of disruption. Ireland, for instance.
Now is the time for Mallett to engage his scrum doctors for the getting of wisdom. Next year will be too late.
Mallett is good at specifics: “[Irish loose forward] Andy Ward is a New Zealander and they are all experts at running obstructive lines off the back of line- outs. That’s why [flanker] Rassie Erasmus was unable to get to the ball in the way he normally does.”
This is not whinging, it is observation. Expect Springbok teams of the future to adopt obstructive lines of running off the back of line-outs.
Another Kiwi, Ireland’s coach Warren Gatland, has suggested that his team learned more in defeat than the Springboks did in victory in Bloemfontein.
Mallett snorts derisively at this suggestion, although it has to be admitted that the Irish have more that they need to learn than South Africa do.
The fact of the matter is that while Ireland had the man of the match in the amazingly combative Keith Wood, the yeomen among their pack will always be on a hiding to nothing as long as they have a fly-half in Eric Elwood who takes every ball standing still, runs sideways like a demented crab and shovels something strongly resembling pig’s offal to his inside centre.
Expect South Africa to be about twice as good at Loftus and another outbreak of whinging supporters uncertain once again as to what exactly counts as a drubbing these days.