Having completed their Tri-Nations campaign in Christchurch on Saturday, the Springboks will now turn their attention to France and the World Cup, starting in Paris in September.
While the 1995 world champions failed to make a telling impact on the southern hemisphere rugby championship after winning just one match from four, coach Jake White will be fairly happy with his team’s performance.
Especially when one considers he toured Australasia without 20 of his leading players — which caused outrage among his rivals, saying it was disrespectful — who stayed home to rest and get over injuries ahead of the quadrennial event.
White decided to keep behind several of his star men, including captain John Smit, locks Bakkies Botha and Victor Matfield, flanker Schalk Burger, centre Jean de Villiers and wing Bryan Habana.
The full-strength Bok side started their Tri-Nations campaign in style with a come-from-behind 22-19 win over Australia — thanks to two late dropped goals by Francois Steyn — while a week later they ran New Zealand close, eventually losing 21-26.
Before that, White chopped and changed his team in triumphing 58-10 and 55-22 against a third-rate England, who are in their pool at the World Cup, while the Boks also scored an emphatic 35-8 victory over another of their pool rivals, Samoa.
The going though was a lot tougher against their traditional southern hemisphere rivals.
However, while White and the South African Rugby Union copped plenty of flak for their decision to leave their leading players at home for the away leg of the Tri-Nations competition, the Boks returned to South Africa on Monday confident that with a full-strength side the World Cup favourites, the All Blacks, can be beaten.
”Give me my best 22 and the Springboks can beat New Zealand in France,” said White after Saturday’s defeat in Christchurch.
The two teams, if all goes according to plan, should progress through to the final in France.
Playing with mainly second- and third-choice players in Australasia the Boks showed character and guts in losing narrowly to Australia and then conceded three tries in the final 11 minutes to go down to New Zealand last weekend.
Both Australasian teams were at full strength.
While White should be pleased with his team’s performances, he will be concerned that the Boks only managed to score five tries from their four games, while at the same time they conceded nine.
The majority of those came in the final quarter of the matches, an indication of the Boks slacking off in the latter stages of contests.
Now back on home soil, White will turn his attention to upping the concentration levels, tighten the defence and improving the attack.
The majority of the Bok tries this year were scored by the forwards, thanks to their superb line-out and driving maul, while a good few others came via the intercept.
White, his coaching staff and World Cup squad, which gets named on Saturday, can now focus solely on the showpiece in France.
There will be no surprises when the South African squad is announced, but there are concerns about the fitness of flyhalf Andre Pretorius, who hasn’t played at all for the Boks this season, while the experienced Bob Skinstad returned home from Australia after breaking ribs.
White, though, will be pleased with the form shown by the likes of flanker Wikus van Heerden and stand-in skipper Johann Muller in Australasia.
Australia and New Zealand, locked on nine points each on the points table, will trash it out this weekend for the honour of being crowned Tri-Nations champions for 2007. — Sapa-AFP