Loose Pass: All Blacks and Springboks facing ‘fraught task’ as ‘critical moment’ looms for Scott Robertson and Rassie Erasmus

Scott Robertson and Rassie Erasmus face off in two All Blacks v Springboks fixtures.
This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with generational change…
Managing the turnover
Eden Park on Saturday, September 6 will host the game between rugby’s number one and number two teams, the two who, aside from brief interruptions from England, Ireland and France, have been the top two in the world for the better part of 20 years.
So sustained excellence over long periods of time and across generations is a habit. You’d back both to prevail. But both seem currently to be grappling with the challenges of generational change.
A South African friend lamented long and in detail on Saturday about the age of many of the current Springboks. “Even the engine room is problematic,” he said. “RG is 30, Lood 32, Eben 33, Franco 34. PSDT is 33. Siya is 34. They’re all class but you’ve got to ask if they can bring the intensity for two more years. On the evidence of 2025, the answer is no. Rassie needs to sort out his phasing-in plan.”
Yet the grass is always greener. Consider this later in the day from a distant and disgruntled Kiwi: “These youngsters coming through aren’t raising it enough, and there’s nobody senior in the team making sure they do either. It all looks mixed and muddled, no clear decision-making, nobody grabbing the game and bending it. Where is our senior core group? We just seem to let them go.”
The changing of guards in a national team is a fraught task. You don’t get the same amounts of time together as you would in a club, nor do you get the daily continuity and home habits, so cultural and hierarchical change within the group occurs in spits and spurts.
In an arena where experience and familiarity count for so much more and results and performances are scrutinised by so many more people in so much more detail, the more drawn-out process of change manifests itself in inconsistencies in on-pitch identity analysed to the millimetre by thousands of fans only interested in the here and now of national pride.
All four of the Rugby Championship teams are going through generational changes of some sort at the moment as the next World Cup begins to seriously loom on the horizon. Australia’s was given a head start with the Lions tour and is well on its way, while Argentina’s has been marked by the sorts of ups and downs referred to above, that can lead them to ship 31 points in a first half one week, then roar back from 13-6 down against the same opposition to claim a famous win the next. The Pumas also face slightly less pressure from their public, which is more comforted – if not entirely satisfied – by good performance in defeat than the New Zealand or South Africa audience.
But the two-Test series in New Zealand has the feel of a critical moment for both Rassie Erasmus and Scott Robertson. The former has been praised in this column in the past for his attempts to succession plan, yet the weekend’s win was so clearly steered in the right direction by the older heads of Eben Etzebeth and Handre Pollard that you feel the plan is not yet working out as would have been hoped for.
But crucially, he does have plenty of credit (not to mention two World Cups) in the bank. Robertson, meanwhile, has never given the impression of having completely mastered this international team gig. If we are fair, nor has the NZRU in the background given the impression of having completely mastered this modern union thing either, but that is not something Mr. Robertson can completely control.
And he does not have the same amount of credit in the bank. There were little rumbles at the time of his appointment that despite his stellar record with the Crusaders, international experience was a glaring miss on his CV.
Informational overload
Justin Marshall’s gripe at the weekend that players looked as though they were suffering from informational overload and less able to think for themselves hit the mark, and it is a symptom of the generational change Mr. Robertson has been trying to engineer. He has a team inexperienced with each other in several positions which perhaps needs more tactical steerage than a more settled one. Yet international teams are not club or franchise teams, not together for as long or with as regular a schedule, not always able to assimilate deep detail in tactical input.
The backbone is always the old heads, the ones who can steer the game on the pitch, who can ignore tactical instruction because of what is in front of them. The exact sorts that Mr. Erasmus is struggling to phase out in fact, while also the exact sorts Mr. Robertson’s over-informational input is perhaps strait-jacketing.
If it was an easy job, we’d all do it. We all do it every week for three hours or so from the comfort of our armchairs, then return to normal life. For the two coaches about to go head-to-head in Auckland and Wellington, it is normal life. Both are managing perhaps the most difficult long-term aspect of a coaching job, changing generations and tweaking cultures to suit. The next three weeks will be a crucial bellwether as to how those processes are going.