Eddie Jones questions Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu’s ‘pressure play’ as he explains why Springboks ‘come through the front door’
Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu starts at fly-half for Springboks.
Ahead of Saturday’s meeting at Ellis Park, Japan head coach Eddie Jones talks through the two rugby cultures he’s spent 40 years studying, why South African transformation has been the making of the Springboks, and the one refereeing call he thinks decides the match.
When I interviewed Jones this week I was full of cold, apologising for it every couple of minutes, and he was entirely untroubled by either the cold or the apologising. I’d gone in expecting a conversation about selection, but what I got was a fascinating argument about architecture.
Ask him why South Africa against New Zealand is the greatest rivalry in the sport and he doesn’t reach for history, or for the head-to-head record, or for any of the things a press officer would hand you. He reaches for a house with two doors.
“South Africa come through the front door,” he told me. “New Zealand traditionally stop you at the front door, and then they go through the side door, through their speed and their athleticism.”
However you dress it up afterwards, that’s the whole thing in two sentences. “To me, that’s the contrast in the cultures,” he said, “and that’s why it’s the greatest rivalry. It’s this clash of rugby ethos, clash of different sorts of athleticism.” He’s careful to add that there’s nothing between the two nations on the thing that actually generates the heat: both are, in his words, “as close as you can get to being the proudest rugby countries in the world.”
Why the Springbok method exposes so little
Put simply, South Africa get up the field through the kick, and once they’re inside the 22 it’s the forwards bashing away at the front door until something gives. That sounds like a limitation and it isn’t.
“When you talk about cohesion of teams,” Jones said, “you get exposed when you’re not cohesive.” The Springboks, by his reading, “haven’t had to build cohesion in the way most Test sides do over a long period, because playing through the kicking game means they don’t need to build up their attack. It’s a method that hides the seams.”
Which is worth remembering when you look at a matchday 23 carrying men who prepped at home last week alongside men fresh off a Test in Buenos Aires; a side built to play any other way would be visibly under-cooked.
The 45 million
The part of the conversation Jones was most animated about had nothing to do with Saturday.
20 years ago the Springbok selection pool was, in practical terms, a closed one, drawn from a narrow band of schools that had always played the game. What has changed since is access rather than standards, and it changed through a pathway rather than a policy.
SA Rugby’s Elite Player Development programme, in place since 2015, tracks players across a five-year cycle that starts provincially at U15 and nationally at U16. Three national U15 tournaments each year deliberately select from schools with four or fewer rugby teams, which is to say from precisely the places the old pipeline never looked. Alongside it, the Rugby Education Foundation puts bursaries into schools and tertiary academies for players identified through that programme, predominantly from disadvantaged communities. Damian Willemse came through it, Kurt-Lee Arendse and Manie Libbok too. And, by now, so too have a great many others.
Jones’s view is that the rugby world has been slow to say out loud what that has produced. “I think it is the most fantastic change,” he told me, “and that point can’t be made strongly enough. The Springbok jersey unites a country in difficulty in everyday life, and it becomes a unified symbol of national pride. And what that change has produced is not a different kind of Springbok but a very much larger number of them!”
The consequence is competition at a scale no other rugby nation can match. “Because of that, they’ve got so much competition,” Jones said. “They’ve basically added another 45 million potential players to the pot that weren’t there before.”
I ran a number recently on Planet Rugby that makes the same point from the other end of the telescope: Maties, the university side at Stellenbosch, field around 1,500 players across all their men’s and women’s programmes on a single Saturday, which is more than the entire North Midlands union manages in England. Jones called that phenomenal, and then called the whole thing “a fascinating piece of socio-sporting change,” which is not a phrase you often get back from a head coach.
He is precise about the distinction between cause and contribution. “You can’t say it was through rugby,” he said, “but rugby was a contributing factor, bringing the country together and showing that all the different cultures within the country can work together.” What Erasmus has driven, in his reading, is “that same spirit of competitiveness and cooperation inside a squad.” But he won’t have the sporting consequence waved away either. “The composition of the team has changed enormously,” he said, “and it’s benefited South African rugby, because they can play that in-your-face, hard-as-nails rugby up front and then move the ball as well as any team in the world.”
Rennie, and getting back to what New Zealand are
On the other side of the argument, Jones sees a coach going back to basics, and he means that as high praise rather than faint praise.
“What Dave Rennie has been able to do in a short period of time,” he said, “is get back to the basics of New Zealand rugby, which has always been about the ball. At the appropriate time, move it quickly to the outside.” Some of that has come through an evolution of thinking and some of it through selection, and Jones credits him with having the nerve to pick young players such as Ruben Love.
Timing has helped him too, and Jones is unambiguous about it. Cam Roigard has arrived at his best at exactly the right moment; “at his best, he’s about as close to the best half-back in the world as there is,” he said, “and he can have a significant influence on the game.” Not a presence in it. An influence on it.
The name he kept returning to from the warm-up matches, though, was Anton Segner. “For me, having watched a lot of those warm-up games, the most outstanding back-rower is Segner,” he said. “He’s powerful, he’s quick, and he’s skilful.” His point is that the compliment cuts both ways; the fact the German-born forward can’t get into that starting pack says as much about the pack as it does about him. Coming on with 20 or 30 minutes to go, “he’s a point of difference. He’s an absolute point of difference.”
There’s a selection argument running underneath all of it. “Will Jordan’s in his correct position at full-back,” Jones said, “where he can actually play like a second full-back. That’s his best role, because it opens up more opportunities.” A false full-back, in other words, drifting like a pendulum behind the first line of defence. Rennie has also gone with two big flankers by using Luke Jacobson in the wider role, which is the French method rather than the English one, and Jones has little patience for the alternative. “Why are you picking a seven at seven,” he asked, “when you’ve got an eight doing seven in open play?”
Two men, two ways of being a head coach in public
The modern layer to this rivalry sits away from the pitch, and Jones added it almost as an afterthought. “In the modern era you’ve got Rassie, who’s the master of how to spin on social media, how to influence through social media,” he said. “And then you’ve got Dave Rennie, who’s still your more traditional coach. Doesn’t say a lot.” It’s a clash of method conducted in a place the laws don’t reach.
Ask Jones what Erasmus’s single point of differentiation actually is, though, and the phone goes quiet for a second and the answer has nothing to do with any of that.
“His ability to drive competitiveness within the squad and then build them into a team,” he said. Not keeping players happy, he corrected me when I used the word; keeping them satisfied, and keeping them hungry for a spot. He pointed at the handling of Faf de Klerk, left out for a long stretch and then given a run off the bench against a scratch side purely to let him know he was still in the mix. “That’s easy to say, and everyone says that,” Jones added. “It’s harder to do, particularly when you’ve got such competition.”
Where Saturday actually turns
For all the culture, Jones thinks it comes down to something narrower and rather less romantic.
“If the referee is a little bit indifferent around the ruck, South Africa will have the advantage. If it’s expected that he polices the parameters World Rugby has outlined recently, especially around side entry, then New Zealand will get a lot of quick ball.”
“And if they get a lot of quick ball,” he said, “I think they might have too many points for South Africa – and the best chance they will have is always on the first hit out.”
One reservation, for what it’s worth, sits at Springbok fly-half, and it’s a game we’d both watched that underlines the point. When Toulon hosted the Stormers at Mayol, Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu had a four-on-one and never saw it. He didn’t look, he didn’t pick it up, and the overlap went unused. He had chances to drop for glory, but still he went one out to carrying forwards, poor decision making at a game close-out moment
I had a long night out with the Toulon players afterwards, and both of the men most exposed by it brought it up unprompted. “I was toast, four on one and I was the only defender on the openside left,” Italian centre Nacho Brex told me; the defence was short, RCT down to 13 due to yellow cards, he was isolated, and had the ball gone wide he admitted had no answer to it. Charles Ollivon, the man who made that heroic last ditch tackle, described the scramble from his side of the ruck, being forced to stay wider and keeping two metres inside his right shoulder to try to get across in time. “But he never made that play,” Nacho said, and that’s the reservation in a sentence.
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Watch the kicking game since and the same instinct shows up. “There’s little doubt he’s a truly world class rugby player and an attacking genius. But is he a world class 10 right now? At the moment it’s a little bit all about him, and he wants to play the magic play; what he isn’t doing is playing the pressure play,” observed Jones. “Set against that, New Zealand have Damian McKenzie’s kicking from 10 as well as Jordan’s running from the back, which gives them two ways to attack the same patch of grass. I’ll be fascinated to see how Sacha has learned from that RCT match and I’ve little doubt he’ll be a better 10 for his errors in that one.”
So the equation is easy to state and difficult to solve. If New Zealand achieve parity up front, the side more likely to score from broken play and transition wins, and on the warm-up evidence that’s New Zealand. But Ellis Park at altitude, with 80,000 people in green and a home side who have spent 20 years learning to knock the front door off its hinges, has never much cared for equations.
