Boks deserve a spring in their step after epic clashes
The All Blacks and Springboks ended the Rugby Championship season nicely squared off; each one had experience of winning a game they really should have lost, and vice versa.
While losing like they did was heart-breaking for the Boks, who conspired against themselves in the last 10 minutes with soft moments on the field and some questionable substitutions from the coaching box, nothing that happened in the frantic final minutes should be allowed to obscure the progress that has been made in relation to their old foe.
There was a Beauden Barrett freeze-frame moment at Loftus that summed up just how much the landscape has changed.
It came in the second half when Barrett beat Bok wing Aphiwe Dyantyi to a ball that had been kicked behind the try line. As Barrett won the race and touched down, it felt like it was a picture we had seen several times when the Kiwis thumped the Boks in 2016 and in 2017.
Only on those occasions it was Barrett scoring a try. This time he was saving a try, and it was something he and his teammates had to do quite a bit in the finale to the Rugby Championship season.
We wouldn’t have imagined the All Blacks having to dig deep to beat the Boks when they posted 57 points in Durban in October 2016. That was just 24 months ago. The 57-0 in Albany was even more recent. Both those games were all about All Black attack and the Kiwis were never tested.
Unlike in Wellington, the Boks dominated large parts of the game at Loftus. They camped in All Black territory and won the battle for possession to almost the same degree their opponents had in the first-round game.
The All Blacks had said they would learn from that game, and they did, with their defence stepping up to what was always going to be their toughest game of the southern hemisphere international season.
Ultimately it might be fair to say that both teams can look back at their clashes this year as hugely positive for their growth.
The Boks got the New Zealand monkey off their backs by winning in Wellington. They proved to themselves they can beat the All Blacks anywhere on a given day and they took that confidence to Loftus.
Conversely, the defeat in Wellington was probably a good thing for New Zealand in that it introduced some rare pressure and subjected Steve Hansen’s men to a proper test of character. Even though the All Blacks had already clinched the Championship, back-to-back defeats would have led to a loss of perspective and perhaps ramifications that would have been out of kilter with reality.
Ahead of this game I felt it was the All Blacks who had more to lose. Unless the Boks lost by a big score, the win on New Zealand soil had already enabled the SA squad to cross a mental barrier. But the All Blacks gained too by coming from a 17-point deficit to win a difficult away game played at altitude. That they did so confirmed they still have their mojo. Had they lost it would have been a very different story, and an important psychological blow against them.
So Rassie Erasmus should be kicking himself for emptying his bench like he did in the final minutes. It cost his team the game. It is common practice for coaches to bring on bench players late in the game, and if he had done that in Port Elizabeth last week we might not ask questions about his decision to do it at Loftus
But Malcolm Marx was still looking strong and Faf de Klerk had played every minute of every game in the Championship, so why not a few minutes more?
In both cases, in a match of that magnitude their experience should have been crucial to helping the Boks retain their momentum and hold their nerve. Instead there was a definite momentum shift after those players left the field and Marx, cutting a disconsolate figure as he accepted his man of the match award, wore his heart on his sleeve when he spoke of the soft moments that let the home team down. There just wasn’t enough experience on the field at the death.
When Erasmus was asked after beating Australia why he did not give Elton Jantjies and Damian Willemse a run, he responded that he does not make changes for the sake of it.
Clearly the closeness of the Nelson Mandela Bay contest dictated to Erasmus that he had to stick with the starting personnel in key positions.
I hope the changes made at Loftus were not inspired by a perception that the Boks had the game wrapped up, for that would be crazy against a New Zealand team that is never beaten until the final siren sounds. If he didn’t know it before, Erasmus knows it now.