Springboks v All Blacks: Five breakdown myths busted and why Greatest Rivalry opener will be decided a second before anyone reaches the ball
Rugby's Greatest Rivalry Test series gets underway at Ellis Park on Saturday.
South Africa and New Zealand will contest close to 300 rucks on Saturday, and both camps have spent the week briefing referees about how the other arrives at them. All of that noise concerns the wrong moment.
The top line is that the breakdown is the most misunderstood contest in the sport, because the part everybody watches matters least. The camera finds the jackal yet the coach and the statistics find the cleaner. The decisive moment happened a second and a half earlier and usually involved neither.
Here’s five things the game gets wrong about it.
The jackal is beaten by the cleaner
He is sometimes but more often he is beaten by distance.
Every coaching manual describes the same ideal. The pencil, or long placement, puts the carrier prone with feet towards the opposition line, body parallel to the touchline and arms extended back towards his own side; the jack-knife, folded at the middle, is next best. Both move the ball as far from the tackler as the body allows whilst narrowing the gate.
Call that separation the post length. A Springbok jackal with an extra metre to travel is still travelling when Luke Jacobson arrives, and Jacobson has a shorter route because the ball has come back towards him. The benchmark is blunt: two to three seconds from the carrier hitting the ground to the ball in the nine’s hands is quick, beyond four gives a defence time to reorganise.
It also sets the arithmetic New Zealand are chasing. The ideal ruck commits one plus two, the carrier and two support players, with the scrum-half the uncounted fourth man. Every extra body a poor post forces you to commit is missing from the next phase, which is why bad presentation costs twice.
Where it happens changes the answer. In the 15-metre channels the tackle is one against one, the tackler is back on his feet quickly and support is further away, so he has a real chance over the ball. That is why attacks anchor more bodies at the edge.
The gate matters this weekend. Matthew Carley is an exacting technical referee who does what he tells the captains he will do, and my expectation is that he polices side entry harder than most. A narrow gate turns a marginal entry into an obvious one, so good presentation does not merely speed the ball up. It wins penalties.
Nobody needs a better cleaner if the carrier has already moved the target.
The first hit belongs to the carrier
When Pieter-Steph du Toit or Paul de Villiers collects a turnover on Saturday, the man who created it will usually be whoever made the tackle a moment earlier, and he will appear nowhere in the record of it.
Win it as a tackler and you have set the post length, the gate width, the number of cleaners the attack must commit and the speed of the next phase, all before an arriving player has made a decision. The carrier lands folded, ball under his chest, needing a second movement before he can present. The post is short, the gate is wide, and the specialist arrives into a contest already won for him.
The clearest illustration happens to be French. François Cros is a 32-year-old Toulouse flanker with two Champions Cups, six Top 14 titles, 40 France caps and a Grand Slam, and not the man his own supporters would name first in that back-row. Toulouse field no openside and no blindside; their flankers work left and right, and fetching is a designated job rather than a number. Jack Willis is le gratteur, effectively the fetcher, translated literally, the scratcher.
Cros is the tin-opener, and his execution is flawless. He works into the seam between the opposition’s first cleaner and the ball, prises the two apart, wins the collision and hands Willis a contest nobody is in position to protect. It is the mirror image of post length: an attack manufactures separation by placing the ball long, and Cros manufactures it by removing the man who should be covering it, the absolutely picture perfect epitome of a ‘plane taking off’, as coaches like to say.
It is tempting to put Du Toit’s collisions down to raw power, and there is a good deal of it. The better explanation is leg drive and accuracy. South African contact work is the most precise in the game: the hit is placed rather than thrown and the legs keep driving through it, turning a tackle that stops a man into one that turns him. It is the scrum principle in open field and the Bok superpower is technical accuacy.
Which is why the instruction to a New Zealand carrier is planes taking off rather than planes landing. Drive up and through, keep the feet underneath, choose the moment of descent. A carrier stopped and then folded is being landed by somebody else.
Post-contact metres tell you who carried well
They tell you little alone, and both packs will post big numbers. South Africa made 294 post-contact metres against Wales to the visitors’ 105; New Zealand made 371 against the Sharks. Neither describes the quality of ball that followed, because the metric measures the journey and ignores the destination.
A back-rower can look dominant whilst producing short, ugly posts that need two cleaners and give the defence four or five seconds to reset. Another makes modest carries and gives his nine the ball on a plate with both support players free for the next ruck. On the spreadsheet the first man is winning. On the video he is losing, whilst the more modest carrier is creating try chances for his backline due to speed of recycle.
Which reframes the extra metre, the most important decision a New Zealand forward makes on Saturday. The question is never whether another metre is available, but what fighting for it does to the post. Win the metre and land folded under Du Toit, lateral to the touchline, and you have spent territory to buy slow ball. Concede the last half-metre, win the floor and present long, and you have created instant width. One and a half metres after contact with a two-metre post beats three metres finishing with the ball under a hip.
There is a collision-selection point underneath it. A carrier attacking the space between two defenders inherits both and is usually stopped square. One who picks a single man, preferably the smaller, can work a shoulder past him and control his own descent. Against this much size, choosing the right man to run at beats choosing the right gap.
You need a specialist seven
Saturday’s two packs answer that question in opposite ways, and the difference is constitutional.
New Zealand run a democratic breakdown, and Dave Rennie’s back-row spells out how the labour divides. Ardie Savea wears eight and does the fetching, working over the ball and as a link from the base. Jacobson and Tupou Vaa’i are there for collision speed rather than for anything they do with their hands on the floor. Their job is to arrive first and arrive square, which is why Jacobson holds the openside jersey ahead of Anton Segner.
That is the inversion worth noticing. The seven is not the fetcher and the eight is not the carrier. Rennie has pointed his two most explosive forwards at the collision, leaving the ball-winning to the man wearing the number that traditionally does least of it. It is a conditioning model as much as a tactical one: his side produces 55 more rucks a game than Scott Robertson’s.
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South Africa are autocratic about it. The licence to gamble over the ball belongs to a very small number, principally Malcolm Marx and De Villiers, whilst the rest of the pack secures, clears and moves on. That is a deliberate division of labour: if only two men are routinely licensed to leave the defensive line and commit to the steal, the line stays intact behind them, the penalty count stays low and the turnover arrives from a specialist who has had the whole afternoon to pick his moment.
De Villiers is the newer and the more instructive. He arrived having won 19 turnovers for the Stormers across the URC season, and against Wales was the top carrier with 16 whilst winning three turnovers. Those lines belong together: a forward who understands presentation from the inside knows which body position on the floor means the ball is a fraction late.
The seven jersey now describes where a man packs down, or at Toulouse which side he works. The role it once denoted has been redistributed, and each side has done it differently.
Slow ruck ball is bad ruck ball
The Opta figures from July make the contrast look damning. South Africa were the slowest of the 12 Nations Championship sides at 4.23 seconds per ruck, which by that benchmark is slow ball by a comfortable margin. New Zealand were third quickest at 2.95, behind France on 2.93 and Ireland on 2.91.
Distribution matters more than the average. Against France, 81 per cent of New Zealand’s ruck ball came inside three seconds. Against England at Ellis Park, only 47 per cent of South Africa’s did. An average tells you where the middle sits; the sub-three percentage tells you how often the ball arrived in a state the nine could use.
Read carelessly, that is a Springbok weakness. Read properly, it is a preference. A side that kicks more and carries less accumulates slower rucks as a consequence of how it uses the ball, and South Africa treat the breakdown as a way of moving opponents laterally rather than a metronome. Their model asks the ruck to create a picture; New Zealand’s asks it to create tempo.
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There is a mechanical caveat most commentary misses. A side that box-kicks heavily posts slower ruck times as arithmetic, because the nine has five seconds from the call of “use it” and often takes most of them. South Africa kicked 121 times across four matches, and reach the try line with fewer carries and rucks than any side in world rugby. That is efficiency rather than sloth.
Which returns the fourth man to the argument. With Cam Roigard on the field New Zealand’s ruck speed fell to 2.90 seconds, which would have led the tournament, because the scrum-half is part of the breakdown rather than what happens afterwards.
Both models depend on the same skill. New Zealand cannot hold 2.9 seconds without long posts, and their democratic system means every forward has to produce one; four rucks in five inside three seconds is impossible if presentation belongs to two specialists. South Africa’s threat over the ball exists to prevent that, and needs only a handful of short posts to justify the design.
The contest everybody will watch in this Greatest Rivalry series opener on Saturday is the one over the ball. The contest that decides it is the one a metre earlier and a second before, and the men who win it will not appear in the turnover column.