Springboks: SEVEN reasons and a ‘damning statistic’ behind their loss to the All Blacks
Springboks: SEVEN reasons and a 'damning statistic' behind their loss to the All Blacks
South Africa had the better scrum, the bulk of the territory and repeatedly entered the New Zealand 22 at Ellis Park, yet they came away with just 16 points, and questions are already being asked of the Springboks.
The top line
Rassie Erasmus was asked afterwards what had gone wrong and, as usual, his analysis was pinpoint. New Zealand, he said, had been stripping the ball in the tackle, and it was a tactic he hadn’t picked up in his analysis. He’d prepared his side for chop tackles and for being driven down, but what arrived instead was a hand on the ball at the moment of contact, again and again, and he described it as “100% legal” before anyone could ask.
He then went further, and with his usual honesty: New Zealand, he said, know how to stop you inside the 22 in several different ways at once, by stripping the ball, by contesting it on the ground and by harassing the scrum-half within the laws, and South Africa couldn’t handle it.
Erasmus could have blamed Matthew Carley, and a fair few expected him to, but he went to the last twenty-two metres instead, where his side spent most of their evening and came away with one try from nine visits, a terrible return for a side that prides itself on its front door efficiency.
Twenty-three turnovers, and a penalty count they won
In total, the Springboks were turned over 23 times, some from the opponent’s skill, some from unforced errors. New Zealand won 14 turnovers to South Africa’s five; defensively, the completion percentage tells a worrying story, with South Africa at 78% against a Test standard of around 84% that all elite sides look for, and it was a most unusual lapse for a side that prides itself on its thundering D. When you see the great Pieter Steph du Toit recording 69% completion, then you start to wonder why the Boks were so poor in their primary work.
Put simply, SA missed one tackle in three, a simply damning statistic.
What makes the loss unusual is that, in the data columns, South Africa did win. They took the penalty count 14-10, had 61 per cent of the territory, and for the first fifty-four minutes they put the New Zealand scrum through a demolition that left the visitors on a 57 per cent success rate at their own put-in. A side that leads the penalties, the territory and the set-piece and loses by seventeen has not been beaten by the referee or by luck. Those defensive lapses matter, but combined with 23 losses of possession they explain how a side dominating territory and set-piece repeatedly handed New Zealand exits and scoring chances.
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Four point four against three point one
Our own count had South Africa recycling at an average of 4.4 seconds and New Zealand at 3.1. Set those against the Opta figures from July, where South Africa were the slowest of the twelve Nations Championship sides on 4.23, and New Zealand third quickest on 2.95 behind France and Ireland, and the interesting thing is how little moved.
Both sides slowed by roughly a sixth of a second, which is what a Test of that intensity does to anybody, but the gap between them stayed at 1.3 seconds, near enough exactly what it had been all summer and one that is vast at elite level.
It means South Africa didn’t panic and didn’t rush, and it means nothing about their breakdown behaviour changed when the scoreboard stopped rewarding them. They recycled at the speed they always recycle at, and it returned 0.9 points a visit instead of the five and a half they average.
We argued before this Test that a slow ruck isn’t a fault in a side that uses the breakdown to move defenders sideways rather than as a metronome, and that the distribution matters more than the average. Against France, 81 per cent of New Zealand’s ruck ball arrived inside three seconds; against England here, only 47 per cent of South Africa’s did.
Between halfway and the opposition 22, four and a bit seconds costs a side very little, because the defence in front of them still has ground behind it to concede and a fold to complete, and lateral movement is exactly what that defence has to give up. Inside the 22 there’s no ground left to surrender, so the defensive line has nothing to lose by pressing hard off its own goal line, and the extra second and a bit is precisely the time a scrambling defence needs to reset its numbers and find its edge again. It is also, as Erasmus discovered, the time a defender needs to get a hand on the ball, and it’s further damning that SA moved up to just under 6 seconds average recycle for ball in 22 in attack.
Jasper Wiese and the men behind him
Wiese’s carry metres were excellent, as they always are, and he led all players with ten carries by half-time. But he repeatedly took the ball beyond his own clearers, and a carrier who gets past his support has bought metres at the cost of the recycle behind him. He did wondrous things, creating some 15 carries for 77 metres, but by our count, South Africa lost possession on six occasions following Wiese carries, due to poor clear-outs, lack of supporting clearers and his own inability to seek continuity via support through pass or offload.
The support lines were also arriving low, which compounds it, since a clearer coming in late and beneath the contest can’t remove a man who is already over the ball, nor can they change direction should the carrier look to pass. Add the fact that Wiese rarely looks to pass or offload once he’s got onto scramble, and you have carries that gain ground, isolate the carrier and hand New Zealand a stationary target with a fraction of a second in hand.
That is the strip tactic’s ideal condition, and South Africa manufactured it repeatedly for their visitors.
Nine entries and what they bought
The entry numbers need proper consideration, because two versions are circulating around the rugby pundit world and they measure different windows of the match.
Our own count, taken to the 64th minute, had South Africa on nine entries at 1.1 points per entry against New Zealand’s six at 4.3. Dave Rennie gave the full-match version afterwards and made the more damning comparison, pointing out that South Africa average five and a half points per 22 entry across the season and managed 0.9 at Ellis Park, whilst his own side were on 3.7, something that shows the effectiveness of the All Black tenacity in D, whilst also underlining their firepower potential.
Take the season average seriously for a moment. A side that turns each visit into five and a half points scores a try slightly more often than not once it arrives. On Saturday, the same side, with the same personnel in most positions and against a pack it was physically dominating, managed under a point a visit.
The scrum won everything except the match
Ox Nché, Malcolm Marx and Wilco Louw put the New Zealand front row through something close to a demolition. Louw won the first scrum penalty of the night in his second scrum after 26 minutes, Nché won one with his third effort just after the half-hour, and Ethan de Groot’s departure before the break with a head knock did nothing to help the visitors.
One correction is worth making here, because some of the early reporting has this wrong. The Springbok scrum did not lose its power when Nché came off. Gerhard Steenekamp replaced him around the 45th minute, won a penalty with his first scrum, and won another with the next one, at which point South Africa scrummed again. The genuine fall-off came in the final quarter, when Steenekamp went off around 66 minutes, and Jan-Hendrik Wessels came on and couldn’t provide any scrummaging impetus at all. Wessels is a hooker covering loosehead off a six-two bench, which is a great deal to ask at altitude in the closing twenty against a front row that by then was entirely fresh.
All of that dominance bought South Africa three penalty goals.
The decision that will follow Erasmus to Cape Town came around the 55th minute, five metres from the New Zealand line, with his side 19-16 behind. He went for the scrum rather than the posts, referee Matthew Carley penalised the Springboks at it, the siege lifted and New Zealand were gone. Erasmus was straightforward about it afterwards, agreeing the call was correct and saying the suggestion should probably have been to take the three. But against the firepower of New Zealand? Some might disagree.
There’s a decent argument that taking three against New Zealand is a losing rate over eighty minutes, and it’s true; a side that settles for three a visit against opponents who score tries will lose more of these than it wins. But that argument had already failed by 55 minutes, and South Africa had eight fruitless entries behind them and a demonstrated conversion rate of about one in nine, so three points was a certainty that levelled the match and the alternative was a bet against their own evidence. Their own 0.9 figure makes the case: nine entries at three points each is 27, and 27 wins that game comfortably. But if you’re NZ, surely you walk back to the halfway line feeling you’ve got out of jail, knowing just how powerful that Springbok rolling maul is?
Sixty seconds that finished it
The Springbok errors weren’t spread evenly across eighty minutes, and, looking at the stats, clear patterns emerge and the clustering tells us a lot about the match flow. Kurt-Lee Arendse went off concussed early, which forced Jesse Kriel, the defence captain, onto the wing. Marx lost the ball over the line in the 36th minute with Jordie Barrett’s hand the cause, so South Africa went in leading by one rather than by seven. Fabian Holland charged down Grant Williams in the 47th minute, gathered, stepped Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu and scored, arriving immediately after Cheslin Kolbe’s penalty had put the hosts 16-12 ahead. These are all Test-level margins and ones that might fall either way.
Then came a minute that finished the contest. Kolbe was injured in the passage of play that led to Luke Jacobson’s try, which meant South Africa lost their goal-kicker, moved Williams to the wing and swapped their fly-half and full-back, all inside about ninety seconds and all because the bench had run out of specialist backs. Jacobson scored off the base of a five-metre scrum on 59 minutes to make it 26-16. The restart that followed went dead, a heinous crime from SFM and one that defines the term coach killers.
It was unforgivable. A restart going dead hands the choice to the receiving side, and they take the scrum on halfway every time. Ten points down with twenty minutes left and two scores needed, South Africa gave New Zealand a set-piece platform in the middle of the field. Ten minutes later Marco van Staden went for a dangerous cleanout and Cobus Reinach for a deliberate knock-on inside a minute of each other, and the hosts finished with thirteen men.
Only the concussion is bad luck. The rest are decisions taken under a scoreboard that kept refusing to reflect the performance, and the last two will remain particularly frustrating. There’s a poetic irony in the Van Staden card, given how much of the build-up Felix Jones had spent on the legality of All Black ruck entries, and that the only cleanout penalised all night was a South African one and Pieter-Steph du Toit, captaining in Siya Kolisi’s absence, admitted his side had shot themselves in the foot and that small errors count.
What Cape Town requires
New Zealand won the second half 21 points to three, and their bench front row edged the better of the bomb squad battle overall.
The temptation for Erasmus will be to change personnel, and there’ll be noise about the half-backs, given Williams and Feinberg-Mngomezulu were starting together for the first time since a South Africa A fixture in 2022 and neither man got a grip on the match. Some of that noise is deserved, but a different nine and a different ten would have inherited the same four and a half seconds inside the 22, the same carriers arriving past their clearers and the same defence with nothing behind it to lose.
The fixes are mechanical rather than nominal and a lot are around those collision and breakdown moments. Shorter carries close to the line so the clearers arrive with the carrier rather than behind him. Support lines coming in higher, at the ball rather than beneath it. A designated short-range plan that doesn’t rely on winning a second contest after the first one has already been won. Take guaranteed points when the match evidence says the preferred attacking route has stopped working.
The second Test is at DHL Stadium on 29 August, a ground where South Africa have lost once, to the British and Irish Lions in 2021. They go into it having surrendered a twelve-Test winning run and the world number one ranking to a New Zealand side unbeaten in seven under Rennie.