Boks failed test, badly

It’s going to be tough for the Springboks to claw their way out of the dark hole they’ve once again found themselves in after the 57-0 defeat to the All Blacks on Saturday. That defeat may seem to threaten to undo all the progress the Boks have made in 2017. But everything that the Boks have done until now, every improvement in performance they’ve shown, every positive result that added up to five wins and a draw, all of that can’t, and shouldn’t, just be discarded because of what happened at the weekend.

The Springboks’ performances against France – although it wasn’t the strongest French side – did count. It was the start of the Springboks’ revival; and, when they opened their Rugby Championship campaign with an impressive victory over Argentina and followed it up with another win one week later, that rebuilding phase that Springbok coach Allister Coetzee has mentioned quite a few times seemed like a reality.

But that disastrous defeat to the All Blacks did taint the Boks’ progress, it made that progress seem less “real”. We always knew that going up against the All Blacks would be the ultimate test, and that everything until that fixture was, although important as well, not as accurate a progress-indicator as the Kiwis.

And, at the weekend, that real test came. It was obviously one that the Springboks failed – badly.

The Boks needed that test to see what they need to get right. And now, as they start their preparations for their second match against the Wallabies in Bloemfontein, they know what to work on and what to fix.

Now Coetzee and the rest of his management team truly know how far they’ve really come. Tough questions are being asked by the South African rugby public, and the Boks will have to come up with the answers.

They need to take a serious, in-depth look at everything that went wrong against New Zealand. Other than the match against Australia in Bloemfontein, the return against New Zealand looms large at Newlands on October 7, and it is in those two matches that the Boks need to restore confidence.