Argentina’s spoiling tactics show how much Boks have progressed in just a few years
That Argentina were so reliant on a spoiling game against the Springboks in their return Rugby Championship fixture in Gqeberha can be seen as a backhanded compliment to how much the world champions have grown in stature over the past few years.
There was a time when the Pumas used to spoil a lot, back in the days when they were consistently outgunned and outclassed by the bigger rugby nations. But those days have long since changed, and when the Jaguares went to the Super Rugby final in 2019 it was off an all-embracing, entertaining and ball-carrying style.
It wasn’t much different to when the Pumas thumped Jean de Villiers’s Boks at Kings Park in a Tri-Nations game about a month before the 2015 World Cup, or for that matter when they won in Argentina in Rassie Erasmus’s first season in charge as coach in 2018.
Mention of Erasmus’s name cues the difference between three years ago and now. When the Boks last lost to the Pumas it was at the start of the Erasmus reign — he was experimenting and spreading his depth before a game against the All Blacks a few weeks later that he regarded as crucial to his team’s development.
The Boks hit the objective that Erasmus had set them by
winning in Wellington, and it has been pretty much a case of up and up since then. The Boks have their aura back, something that was spoken a lot about when it was noticeably absent during Allister Coetzee’s twoyear reign, and that arguably started to slide when the Boks were beaten by Argentina and Japan in 2015.
When a team graduates to becoming a champion unit expectations start to change. It is becoming clear that in time it will no longer just be acceptable for the Boks to win; they will need to do so in style if their supporters are to be completely satisfied. But it is worth pausing to think about where the Boks were just four years ago, when they were beaten 57-0 by the All Blacks in Albany.
The core of that team doesn’t differ much from the core of the current team, so while there is a temptation to laud the players, it is obvious where the difference lies. It lies in the coaching, just as it did when Nick Mallett took over a woeful Bok team after a Lions series defeat in 1997 and turned them into winners in
Europe and then Tri-Nations champions. Jake White did the same when he replaced Rudolf Straeuli in 2004.
The current success, and the reason Argentina are now looking at damage limitation against the Boks rather than believing they can win, comes down to the coaches, and in particular the man who started the revival, Erasmus.
That some may be quibbling about the missed bonus point against the Pumas is a measure of how much the landscape has changed for the national team. Before the second-string Bok team played the Pumas the previous week, it was expected that the Pumas would show a lot of confidence. After all, they had only lost once since the World Cup.
Maybe they were confident, but that confidence was quickly undermined by the way the Boks bossed them physically and shut them out with their defence and aerial bombardment. An emotional response was expected in the next game and the way they sang their anthem telegraphed their determination, passion and intent. They started like a supremely motivated team.
But after a few initial forays into Bok territory that came to nothing it quickly became apparent again that again they were going to be no match for the Boks. From there it just became a case of spoil, spoil and spoil again. Referee Karl Dickson awarded 13 penalties to the Boks in the first half but short of sending half the Pumas off, he was powerless to do much more.
The Boks quickly figured out what was going on and they did the right thing in building scoreboard pressure by kicking penalties. And when they scored two tries relatively soon after the start of the second half, it was clear they were providing a quintessential example of the subdue and penetrate approach that has been the traditional SA way for more than 100 years. The floodgates looked set to open and a 50-point win was likely.
That it did not turn out that way may have been down to a combination of factors, such as the raft of changes that were made in the quest to give new players game time, the injury to reserve scrumhalf Jaden Hendrikse that reduced the number of backs to six, and perhaps just the way the Pumas sustained their negativity.
When they did score right at the end they worked hard for it, and appeared to see the try as a kind of win. Clearly scoring against the Bok defensive system has become an achievement and the 19-point winning margin for the world champions is just becoming the expectation. It is what happens when you graduate from being contenders to champions.