Coach plays reverse sweeps while Springboks look precarious

Springbok coach Rassie Erasmus will go into the litmus test of his first Test against New Zealand in a hole largely of his own making. His chances of getting out of that hole, to borrow from cricketing parlance, might depend on how willing he is to put away the reverse sweep that has prevented him from building a foundation to his innings.

Those of us who watched both Rugby Championship games at the weekend might be in agreement that what All Black coach Steve Hansen is trying to do is not dissimilar to what Erasmus is trying to do. They both want to build depth ahead of the 2019 World Cup.

It was with his eye on Japan that Hansen made seven changes to his winning team. After two wins against Australia, a home Test against the Argentinians was as good an opportunity as any to give Richie Mo’unga a chance to build some international experience as a member of the starting team. The upshot was that the All Blacks weren’t always as cohesive in Nelson as they might have wanted to be. Although they won well, it was not a game they dominated.

Erasmus, almost since the day he took over as coach, has been mixing and matching in the same way that Hansen did in this game. Returning to a cricketing analogy, here is the difference between the two. If you take the World Cup cycle as one team’s innings, Hansen was at 210/1 when he went into the game against the Pumas.

The core of the All Black team has been established, the winning momentum is so long entrenched that the New Zealand national team has almost become subhuman with its ability to ride out any storm and still prevail with some degree of comfort.

The only area where the All Blacks were on top of the Pumas was in the scrums and yet they banked a bonus point win. It was a case of 210/1 becoming 230/1 (we’re talking Test match cricket here).

When Erasmus took the Bok job, the team was already in a precarious position in its World Cup build-up. Let’s say they were 33/3. The two wins at the start of the series against England improved them to 80/4. But that was still not a good enough position for the Bok coach to pull out the fancy shots and it required him to continue sticking to the basics, to play straight, to build to a position of stability before becoming flamboyant.

By experimenting against England in the final Test of that series Erasmus was producing the rugby equivalent of a reverse sweep, and he has paid for it. He’s not, and never was from the outset, in Hansen’s position where there may be room for experimentation.

He needed to settle on his best team and introduce new talent around a core of settled combinations that would give him a better chance of building the winning habit that is surely a much stronger foundation for World Cup success than the path he has taken in the early part of his tenure.

Can the Boks win on Saturday? They certainly can. They have the forwards who can make a physical statement against the All Blacks, who can take the Kiwis out of their comfort zone. We saw that in 2017 at Newlands, where the Bok pack smashed the visitors and made them look ordinary.

However, as Mario Ledesma, the Argentina coach, remarked during his team’s recent visit to SA, the All Blacks still won that game. As they tend to when they are pushed.

Erasmus was already up against it in his quest to catch up when he took the Bok job and there are myriad reasons why the All Blacks are so far ahead. A big one is that they have a settled core that is building off a foundation of success. They have built the confidence that allows them to play the shots that carry much greater risk when tried by their rivals.

Expect the Boks to do what the Pumas did and win many of the minor battles in Wellington. Even expect the All Blacks to look uncomfortable at times against a Bok pack that is more physical than any other unit they will encounter. But the All Black forwards have physicality married to skill. They are also more settled.

Those factors should enable the Kiwis to maintain the decisive edge they have had on the Boks since 2009.