Loose Pass: Rassie Erasmus went ‘into the laager’ as ‘generational’ Springboks performance blows away ‘spent’ All Blacks
Springboks face All Blacks haka. (Photo by James Foy/Speed Media/Icon Sportswire)
This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with perfection, World Cup qualifying, and the nemesis on the horizon…
How good was it?
A South African coaching mentor once talked to me after a game which had culminated with the team I coached at the time suffering a particularly bruising defeat. “How are you going to respond to this one?” he asked. Not actually having much of a clue about how I was going to respond to the looming long Sunday, never mind getting together a coherent training plan for the week, I mumbled something along the lines of “well, we’ll just have to get stuck into it and make sure we get the basics right all week.”
“Yes, that’s it. Shut out everything else, don’t speak to anyone and get the boys hitting again,” he said. “You must go into the laager.”
‘Going into the laager’ is an Afrikaans phrase, specifically referring to a defensive circle of wagons from trekker times, but the broader use is simply descriptive of a defensive and protective posture.
When Rassie Erasmus returned to his preferred strategy of naming his team on Monday of last week, rather than try to leave his counterpart guessing by waiting until Thursday I instantly thought of this conversation. It’s a lot harder to go into the laager when you’ve press conferences organised all week, but the message was clear and simple: “Sometimes we feel naming our team on Monday, it’s out of the way, and the speculation is out of the way,” he said. Go back to what works. Get together. Shut out the noise. No more thinking, just do the job.
“That’s what you love about him, you just don’t know what’s coming. Outstanding,” said Erasmus’ counterpart Scott Robertson when informed of the Monday announcement. But he could have known. Erasmus himself told everyone what was coming all week: “the team we picked, we think we can match the pace while bringing the physicality,” he said. The way they played, it might have been the only thing he said at training all week. Over and over again. Pace. Physicality. That’s it.
That second half will remain a benchmark half of rugby for many years. It’s right up there with a half of rugby Saracens once produced against Bath as perhaps the most impressive 40 minutes of rugby your correspondent has ever seen. But this was away. Against the All Blacks. It was a generational performance. Some Kiwi fans and pundits have turned to self-criticism almost in disbelief, but watching the highlights again – especially the final try, in which New Zealand simply looked spent – it’s impossible to escape the fact that this was a win borne out of South Africa‘s own brilliance rather than New Zealand being second class.
The reality
Even with Samoa having fallen relatively meekly to Fiji and Tonga across the previous three weeks, you’d have been hard-pushed to predict just how comprehensively they’d go down to the USA the weekend past. With World Cup qualification on the line, Samoa lost 29-13 to a well-organised side and now face a play-off against Chile to qualify for Australia 2027. One of the World Cup’s most storied nations is on the brink of missing out altogether.
Yet while there are similarities between the two countries, the projected paths tell a very different tale.
The similarities? Well, the two teams are drawn mostly from the USA‘s Major League Rugby, which this week was dealt another mortal blow when the Houston Sabercats became the latest team to withdraw from next season’s edition. Samoa does not currently have the stardust in its ranks that its teams of yesteryear did. Whether the reasons are financial or generational is not clear – it’s a mixture of both but with little perceivable bias – but it was evident on Saturday’s team sheet. With the exception of the trio of notable old heads of Melani Nanai, Michael Alaalatoa and Christian Leali’ifano, the Samoan team was not full of household names such as the teams of yesteryear.
Neither was the USA’s. But while Samoa’s union continues to toil under financial stress, the same stress that saw last year’s November tour cancelled and the women’s team crowdfund just to participate in the World Cup, the USA sits pretty on the $250m pledged by World Rugby over the years in the run-up to the USA World Cup. There is little of such support on offer from the governing body to Samoa, with World Rugby saying that the Samoan union has put itself in this position.
How that money is used needs to be scrutinised very, very carefully. The stadium in Colorado for Sunday’s game was cavernously empty, while professional structures continue to crumble. But that is a serious chunk of cash which would shore up those structures if used wisely.
The result of Saturday’s game was good news for World Rugby, whose strategic darling and its attached market will now have a place at the top table in 2027 before hosting the feast in 2031. But succeeding in the USA is no sure thing at all, however much cash you chuck at it. And while Samoa’s problems are largely self-inflicted, losing them from the World Cup might cause more pain to the rugby landscape than the USA’s presence would add.
Black Ferns looming large for England
England‘s ladies set a new record on Sunday, racking up their 31st Test victory in a row and making it 61 victories in 62 Test matches. The blemish? The last World Cup Final, in which the Red Roses fell to New Zealand. The 63rd match in that retrospective sequence? A one-point loss to France in the 2018 Six Nations. And the last loss before that? The 2017 World Cup Final to, erm, New Zealand.
This is England’s tournament, and England’s moment if you believe the hype, but nobody watching the World Cup unfold should be in any doubt that it is still, currently, New Zealand’s Cup. The Black Ferns are unbeaten in knockout rounds since 1991, for the simple reason that they continue to consist of very talented and savvy rugby players who are good at finding ways to win when it counts.
South Africa tested them to the full on Saturday, not least in the maul and line-out, which the England staff will surely have taken note of, but the response early in the second half was devastating.
The results suggest an England side in full pomp, but the reality is that, due to the gulfs in quality between the few and the many, England simply haven’t had much of a test yet. A 40-8 win is never a bad result, but there were a lot of points still left on the Ashton Gate turf. New Zealand would not have left them lying there.
New Zealand face off against tournament dark horses Canada this weekend, while England tackle France, who did not look fluid against Ireland. For all of Le Crunch rivalry, it’s easier to see Canada running New Zealand close than it is to see France threatening England. History is full of teams whose ability to do it the harder way through play-off rounds stood them in good stead in finals. England must beware this, lest they return to the Finals less tested and unable to dig in in the way New Zealand have.
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