Springboks v All Blacks: Five takeaways as Rassie Erasmus’ men take Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry trophy after ‘barely breaking stride’ in Baltimore
South Africa's captain Siya Kolisi holds the trophy aloft as he celebrates with teammates after defeating the All Blacks and inset of Jesse Kriel and Richie Mo'unga.
Following the Springboks’ 43-28 win over the All Blacks in Baltimore, here are our five takeaways from the final Test of Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry.
Fifty years on, and the very same 3-1
The last time South Africa won a Test series against New Zealand, the All Blacks had toured for four Tests and lost three of them, the world was arguing about apartheid and honorary white status rather than about rugby, and 25 African nations boycotted the Montreal Olympics over it. That was 1976. Half a century later, the Springboks have beaten New Zealand over four Tests again, by exactly the same 3-1, and taken the inaugural Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry trophy with it.
Put that in its proper frame. The Rugby Championship was stood down for a season to make room for this, both unions gambled a year of their calendar on it, and the whole thing was played out 12 months from a World Cup in Australia. New Zealand used more than 50 players across eight matches in seven weeks and lost Ardie Savea, Luke Jacobson, Quinn Tupaea, Billy Proctor and Cortez Ratima along the way.
South Africa lost Cheslin Kolbe’s jaw in Soweto and barely broke stride. Rassie Erasmus has now had four consecutive weekends of live evidence against the only other side in the world with a claim on the Webb Ellis Cup, and he will go to Australia next year knowing exactly what he has.
Nobody in the world carries a bench like this
Start with the number that explains most of the others. South Africa made 523 post-contact metres to New Zealand’s 362 off 142 carries against 137. The same volume of work, 161 metres more ground, and almost everything else on the stat sheet runs downstream from it.
Damian de Allende carried 18 times and Jasper Wiese 17, the two highest counts on the field, and between them they put South Africa over the gain line every time the game looked like drifting. De Allende’s try on 15 minutes was entirely his own doing, four hammered carries up the guts, Morne van den Berg held short, and then the 12 going from the base through a defence that had only stopped going backwards because it had run out of room. Wiese held two men in every collision for half an hour.
Then Erasmus emptied his bench with 35 minutes left and the gap widened rather than closed. Andre Esterhuizen’s carry made the ruck from which Pieter-Steph du Toit went over on 53. Cameron Hanekom, who had nearly cost his side a try with a marginal tackle three minutes earlier, scored on 76 to take it beyond argument. Deon Fourie, who became the oldest Springbok in history in Cape Town a fortnight ago at 39 years and 338 days, quietly extended his own record by another two weeks; he turns 40 on 25 September and South Africa play Australia in Perth on the 27th.
New Zealand solved the rush defence, and it still wasn’t enough
Give Dave Rennie’s side this much. The best try of the night was theirs, and the design behind it was the best piece of thinking either coaching box produced all evening.
They set a 4-1-3, let the Springbok line speed commit to the pod in front of them, threw it out the back of it, and had Will Jordan folding in off his wing into the 13 channel as the extra man. That’s the answer to a rush defence. The harder South Africa came up onto the stack the further behind the ball they were when it got away, and the second defender then has to come from somewhere. Richie Mo’unga, in his first Test since the 2023 World Cup final, and Jordie Barrett did the creating, Damian McKenzie carried it to the touchline, Cam Roigard came back inside, and Codie Taylor crashed over inside eight minutes.
They went back to Jordan for the second, though it cost them 32 phases on the Springbok line to get there, with De Allende and Jesse Kriel both buried in the previous ruck by the time the ball reached the open side.
Ethan Blackadder made 21 tackles, more than any man on the park, in his first start of the series and his 14th Test, and he was quite superb throughout. New Zealand passed 181 times to South Africa’s 148 at a kick-to-pass ratio of 1:10.6 against 1:6.4, so the ambition never once wavered.
What did waver was everything around it. Eighteen turnovers lost to 15, and a pack assembled in a week at the end of an eight-match tour asked to reproduce that shape twice inside 20 minutes against a Springbok bench arriving fresh on 45. They couldn’t do it. Beauden Barrett’s late try made it 43-28 and told you very little.
Van den Berg’s night, and Sacha’s misfortune
Morne van den Berg was named man of the match and he earned every inch of it. Promoted ahead of Cobus Reinach for the decider, he dummied off the side of the maul on 22 minutes and went under the posts when Sam Darry bought it, he took the goal-kicking over midway through the second half and landed the conversion of Du Toit’s try, and his box-kicking fed an aerial contest South Africa won from first whistle to last.
That aerial game was the whole afternoon. Ethan Hooker beat Jordan in the air again and again, De Allende climbed in midfield to regather, and Damian Willemse, kept collecting off his own boot. South Africa received 10 restarts to New Zealand’s five and won 91 per cent of them, and New Zealand’s back three of Jordan, McKenzie and Josh Moorby, picked to punish anything long and loose, were given nothing long or loose to punish.
Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu’s first half hour was as good as anything he’s produced in green, the penalty on four minutes, the footwork at the line that made De Allende’s try, the high spirals that started the procession. Then his kicking fell away badly, the conversion on 49 missed in front of the posts, and he limped off just after the hour with a hamstring, which rather settles the question of what happened to him.
Manie Libbok came on and put the restart out on the full with the game still at one score. Kurt-Lee Arendse’s four line breaks were the most of any player on the field, and his 70-metre finish on 73 minutes was the moment this stopped being a contest.
The night the comms went down
The referee communications failed completely in the first half and the match stopped for around 10 minutes whilst both unions formally agreed to carry on without them. No TMO. No assistants feeding offside lines or anything happening off the ball. No microphone for the broadcast either, which on the one night rugby most wanted to explain itself to a new audience is a real loss, because the referee’s mic is the best teaching aid the sport owns.
It should have been a mess and it wasn’t. Matthew Carley had to bellow across that New Zealand had played the ball on the floor, the penalty stood, South Africa went to the corner, and Van den Berg scored from the maul that followed. The tightest call came on 73, when Hanekom’s tackle on Jordan looked early, Jordan spilled it, and Arendse picked the loose ball up and went the length of the field; Karl Dickson ruled the contact simultaneous with the ball arriving and gave the try, which was the right answer and not an easy one to reach.
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Nine penalties apiece, no cards, and nothing anybody was still arguing about at the whistle. World Rugby will want to know what caused it, because a Test in a market it is trying to win is the worst possible place to lose the technology.
Springboks v All Blacks: Huge payday awaits SA Rugby and NZ Rugby for taking RGR Test to Baltimore
68,173 came through the gates at M&T Bank Stadium, past the 62,300 sold in advance and clear of the mark set when Ireland beat New Zealand at Soldier Field in 2016, which makes this the largest crowd ever to watch a rugby match in North America.
Be honest about it too. That’s short of the 71,000 capacity and a long way short of the near 86,000 who filled FNB Stadium last Saturday in filthy weather, and anybody selling tonight as proof that America has fallen for rugby is a fair way ahead of the evidence. The money came first, as it always does, with the additional revenue reported at between R80 million and R100 million a union above what a fourth Test at home would have produced, and World Rugby paying a fee of its own to put the fixture into one of the 27 cities bidding to stage matches at the 2031 World Cup.
But they played it on an NFL field with the hash marks showing through the paint and the touchlines closer to the posts than a Test ground would permit, in front of a lower deck split green and black the whole way round, and the noise came from the 133,000 South Africans living in the United States who had been singing Shosholoza outside the team hotel all week. TEG Rugby Live, who promoted the match, already held the five biggest crowds for international rugby on American soil. They have just broken their own record.