Ireland put Boks on notice with playful win over France
If there was any thought among the Springbok brains trust that their champion team will be able to ease their way into the first international season of the new World Cup cycle, it would have been swept away by Ireland’s performance against France.
That the Irish are on a different planet to the one they were on when they changed the narrative of SA/Ireland clashes in Allister Coetzee’s first match in charge of the Boks at Newlands in 2016 is something we already knew before they opened their latest Six Nations campaign with a resounding 38-17 win in Marseille.
But Friday showed just how formidable a challenge the Boks face when they host Ireland in a two-match series in July. Ireland won convincingly against France last year, but that was in Dublin. Turning them over with a five-try thumping in France would have reverberated around the rugby world.
The two teams that ended the World Cup just more than three months ago feeling the frustrated and disappointed, provided a great advert for how healthy the sport is at the very sharp end of international rugby. By sharp end I am referring to the top four — SA, Ireland, France and New Zealand.
The weather and no doubt mental and physical fatigue arrived in the last fortnight of the World Cup in France, but the quarterfinals involving those four teams were universally acclaimed as possibly the finest World Cup matches yet.
There’s a sizeable gap between those four teams and the rest, and the first weekend of the 2024 Six Nations reminded us of that.
Scotland showed just how tough the group of death that the Springboks were part of in France was when they scored 20 first-half points on the way to racing into a 20-0 lead in Cardiff. When they led 27-0 they looked like rewriting the record books for more than just that it would be their first win at the Principality Stadium in 22 years.
But for Scotland consistency has always been the problem and sure enough the reality check came in the second half. Suddenly they were fallible as a young, inexperienced Wales team led for the first time by 21year-old Dafydd Jenkins scored 26 second half points.
No-one denies that Italy improved. That it is why
Benetton are becoming a serious threat in the United Rugby Championship, but England didn’t produce the quality performance in Rome that suggested they will challenge Ireland and France either. So though Ireland do have to go to Twickenham in the penultimate weekend, we can be reasonably assured that Ireland will come to SA as the European champions.
That’s huge for the series. The only pity is that it is not being played as a three-Test series, as Ireland’s epic historymaking series against New Zealand was two years ago. What’s with it with these twogame series? Ireland made history in Cape Town in 2016 but didn’t win the series. The Boks bounced back a week later in Johannesburg and clinched the rubber with a tight win in Gqeberha. That is the most recent time the Boks have beaten Ireland though, and it will be a gap of eight years by the time they clash in the first Test in Pretoria on July 6.
The Boks will have to hit the ground running at altitude (the second game is in Durban) against a team that showed against France that there is life after the retired Johnny Sexton.
Jack Crowley started nervously but settled and turned in a performance that should silence the doubters about his ability to replace Sexton as Ireland’s game driver.
It is always hard to replace a player with Sexton’s experience and standing, and it would be the height of folly to make assumptions after just one game, but Ireland will go being the force after the World Cup that they were before it.
There was a red card there too often is nowadays but Ireland were already leading 173, and dominating all the relevant phases of the game, when Paul Willemse received his second yellow that automatically became red.
France didn’t lose because they were reduced to 14 men; they were simply outplayed by a world-class team that, having broken through a barrier by winning a series in New Zealand, will arrive in SA in July hungry to cross another frontier.