Plenty of answers but one big question remains
THE Springboks return home from tour with a 50% Test win record, but that pales into irrelevance when you consider that this tour was essentially a fact-finding mission about player depth and an exercise in game evolution.
On both of these fronts, Jacques Nienaber and Rassie Erasmus gathered vital intelligence as they put the flesh to the skeleton of their plan for the 2023 World Cup.
All of this year, Nienaber has tempered his talks of plans to defend the World Cup and the need for experimentation because Bok supporters are results obsessed and will not tolerate failure, and all hell broke loose when Nienaber’s depth-building mission failed in Bloemfontein when Wales upset the apple cart.
Still, players were blooded and nobody is complaining now that Kurt-Lee Arendse was given a chance back then, and Evan Roos, a debutant that day in Bloemfontein, was ominously good at Twickenham.
Perhaps most significantly, the Boks now have a battery of flyhalves with experience at Test level when in July this year they had only Handre Pollard and Elton Jantjies, and right now they are not missed.
But I am going to add a caveat to the good feeling about how Damian Willemse and Manie Libbok have come through.
The big issue with the Boks on this tour has been the conspicuous absence of a proper goal-kicker and let’s get real about trying to win a World Cup with part-timers Faf de Klerk and Cheslin Kolbe as the sharpshooters.
It is a fact of life that you cannot win a World Cup without an ace kicker. As excited as we deserve to be about how the Boks have grown into an attacking force with ball in hand, there will be tight games at the World Cup where a goal kick here and there will decide the outcomes.
Willemse is not a reliable goal kicker and if he starts at 10 in France, who takes the kicks?
Libbok has sorted his kicking out since working with kicking coach Gareth Wright this year and if he starts at flyhalf in France the problem is solved, but what then you do with the attacking force that is Willemse?
Move him back to fullback? *
What then of Willie le Roux, who is playing the best rugby of his career and is too valuable a playmaker to revert to the bench.
Stormers boss John Dobson believes Willemse’s best position is 12, and that makes sense, but the other Damian, De Allende is too good to be displaced.
The issue of finding a place for a proper goal-kicker is one heck of a conundrum facing Erasmus and Nienaber and rather them than me because I don’t have the answer.
Well, they have time to figure it out and they will go on holiday content that this tour has proved that they have another arrow to their quiver for France 2023, and that is the ability to counter-attack with flair and not always rely on the infernal box kick and the terribly boring line-out maul which in any case doesn’t work anymore because the opposition knows how to defend it.