In the wake of South Africa’s 23-21 loss to New Zealand in Christchurch last week a few questions have to be asked. What, for instance, is the point of phase play? The All Blacks scored the winning try in the 80th minute by holding on to the ball through 15 phases. By contrast, the Springboks never once held the ball beyond three phases, yet they scored three tries to one.
So has coach Jake White found a new way to play the game? Quite the contrary; he has merely rekindled a few old-fashioned virtues. The Springbok team that won the World Cup in 1995 was the best defensive unit at the tournament. Able to harass opponents into making errors, Kitch Christie’s team was adept at scoring from turnover ball.
Sound familiar? It should, because that’s what happened on Saturday. There was, of course, one main difference: Christie’s teams didn’t lose. When White and his players reviewed the video of the game on Monday they must have drawn some very different conclusions from those formed in the aftermath of an emotional occasion.
Given the paucity of ball available to the Springboks it is astonishing how many times they kicked it away or knocked it on, while for the second week running the All Blacks had three-quarters of all the possession and delivered just one try, albeit a match-winning one from Doug Howlett. Logically New Zealand should have won by 30 points.
That they did not was due to several factors, not least of which was referee Andrew Cole’s disinclination to police the offside line. That in turn meant that the Springboks were able to stick to a game plan that pushed the boundaries of legality to the limit.
Jaco van der Westhuyzen’s role at flyhalf, for instance, was simply to rush forward and get his body between Carlos Spencer and the player he wished to pass to. The aim was to prevent the All Blacks from getting the ball wide and it worked like a dream for 79 minutes, thanks to an unusually lenient Australian referee.
That tactic cannot possibly work two weeks in a row, however, and if there is one theme that the players need to take to heart ahead of this week’s Test against Australia, it is that the ball needs to be protected as though it were a Fabergé egg. Give the ball away against the Wallabies and you might not see it again for 10 minutes.
Ultimately, the All Blacks won because their tight forwards lost a few battles, but won the war. White will look back on two tactical decisions in particular and wonder whether he may have erred. The first was in substituting Eddie Andrews with half an hour left on the clock. There were undeniable signs that the Springbok scrum was starting to creak, but Andrews’s replacement, Faan Rautenbach, proved to be a liability.
This was an accident waiting to happen. Rautenbach has not played a full game for anyone in 2004 and is, in fact, carrying a reputation for technical excellence that does not bear close scrutiny. Rather like his former team-mate at Western Province, Werner Greeff, Rautenbach’s legend grew the longer he remained unavailable.
In the harsh light of a Test match, with no game time behind him, Kees Meeuws, a tighthead prop playing out of position on the loosehead side, exposed Rautenbach. It is to White’s great credit that he has recognised this and replaced Rautenbach on the bench with CJ van der Linde in the team to play Australia that was announced on Wednesday.
The other tactical error was to remove AJ Venter with 15 minutes remaining in order to give Joe van Niekerk a run. It is true that Venter had picked up a knock, but he could and should have finished the game. Van Niekerk was rushed out to join the squad against the wishes of his provincial coach, Carel du Plessis.
White is of the opinion that Van Niekerk offers attacking flair not present in the other members of his back row, but last Saturday was the wrong time and place to test that theory. White’s problem was that he had announced two weeks earlier that he would get Van Niekerk on to the field in Christchurch by hook or by crook. In the heat of the moment he made the wrong call, but that’s not a crime.
What was a crime was allowing Victor Matfield to leave the tour to play for the Blue Bulls. It is not inconceivable that Matfield’s presence would have made the difference between winning and losing.
John Smit’s torpedo throw over the lineout in the dying moments would have been unnecessary if he had had the reassuring presence of Matfield staring back at him, while the big man’s extra bulk may have been enough to hold Rautenbach in place at the scrums.
All of the above criticism will become largely irrelevant, of course, if the Springboks win in Perth on Saturday. To do so they will need a far more elaborate game plan than that used against New Zealand. The Wallabies are past masters at camouflaging the weakness of their tight five, while their backs are the best in the business.
Under White the Boks have regained the respect of the international community, but his task this week is to add a creative dimension to a ferociously committed defence. It’s not impossible that Perth 2004 might be the big breakthrough, but it might just have come one game too soon.