Springboks leap out of jail with refreshing tactical flexibility
Hands up all those who either posted a disparaging tweet about the Springboks or thought about posting one during the first 20 minutes of the Ellis Park Test.
My hand would go up were it not for a reluctance to get involved with that form of social media for the very reason that many might now be wishing they’d resisted the temptation on Saturday. Those who did tweet can’t be faulted.
The Boks were in a huge hole when they fell 24-3 behind, and at that point England were bossing the game.
That the Boks came back to win a freaky match was down to something Rassie Erasmus’s predecessor Allister Coetzee did not seem capable of achieving. They saw where they were going wrong and quickly adjusted their tactics. The difference between Erasmus and Coetzee was further made apparent at the postmatch media conference. Erasmus blamed himself for the slow start, saying he had got the tactics wrong. He had expected England to kick and it left the players needing to make an adjustment. Coetzee would never have admitted to making an error of judgment.
One of Erasmus’s big strengths is his tactical astuteness. We can also add a few other attributes, such as canny selection and bravery.
It took guts to select a team devoid of settled combinations to play against England, particularly in such an important match, one that could well set the tone for the early part of his tenure.
My gut feeling was that he’d got some of his selections wrong. No ways would I have played Bongi Mbonambi in the starting team ahead of Akker van der Merwe.
There were a few others, such as the omission of Jesse Kriel’s experience. Yet when I bumped into him after the team announcement on Thursday, Erasmus showed great faith in his own instinct.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be all right,” he assured me.
They were more than all right, at least after that initial period when they were too narrow defensively. The game has to rank as one of the most positive starts to a home international season in years.
No one will pretend there isn’t plenty to work on and a lot to fix, but SA couldn’t have expected more from the start of the new era than what Siya Kolisi’s team delivered.
England don’t have all their key players but they do have most of them, and it wasn’t long ago that they were second on the world rankings and had only lost one game since the 2015 World Cup.
They were the more settled and experienced team at Ellis Park. All the combinations the Boks fielded had never played together before.
For that reason this was a game that was played to different expectations than was the case when England last played at what their coach Eddie Jones referred to in 2012 as the spiritual home of South African rugby.
Back then, in Heyneke Meyer’s second match in charge, the Boks still retained a core of experienced players and a few combinations that had been together at the World Cup in New Zealand seven months before.
The most recent match was effectively between the thirdand the seventh-ranked teams and after the first quarter it looked like it. Erasmus admitted he was worried, but he has a calmness about him since returning from his stint in Ireland that he hasn’t always had, and that composure was reflected by the team leadership on the field.
The defence will have to be sorted out, but that is not a major adjustment to make. Although England coach Jones was right when he said the Boks used a get-out-of-jail-free card they are unlikely to be presented with again in the form of his own team’s indiscipline under pressure, it is also true that the Boks should get better from here.
The new players that were blooded came through their baptism with a tick next to their names and the two overseas players Erasmus selected at the back, scrumhalf Faf de Klerk and fullback Willie le Roux, also vindicated their selections.
Duane Vermeulen was immense in his comeback game and RG Snyman was the stand-out forward.
It was a positive start, and it needed to be after the mistake of playing the first match of Erasmus’s tenure in Washington, something that did affect the Johannesburg performance in the sense that the explosive players selected on the bench, most of whom had been to the US, didn’t put England away perhaps like they should have.
There was the old Ellis Park factor too, and the Boks know they can’t afford to fall behind like that at another venue. But the win has brought some breathing space that should encourage further growth ahead of Bloemfontein.