Why All Blacks and France are built to stay with the Springboks, whilst England trail behind
England players during the Six Nations, Springboks skipper Siya Kolisi and France and Toulouse star Antoine Dupont.
South Africa lead Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry series 2-1 against New Zealand with one Test to play in Baltimore on Saturday, so the worst they can now do is share it, and anybody filing that under golden generation doesn’t understand the depth of culture these nations possess.
They’ll still be doing this in 2031; New Zealand and France are the two countries best built to stay with them, whilst the rest of us trail enviously behind. Alex Lowe of The Times is out in SA, close to unheard of for a UK outlet on a series involving neither England nor the Lions, and Planet Rugby has two writers in situ.
Social media has been at war since the All Blacks put 33-16 on the Springboks at Ellis Park and ended a twelve-Test winning run; Cape Town overturned the result 33-26 with Siya Kolisi restored, and on Saturday the Boks came from behind in Soweto to win 29-24 in front of 87,976, which put them 2-1 up and gave Kolisi a record 55th win as captain. Some of the fan exchange has been venomous and a bit of it genuinely ugly, but most of it is two sets of supporters slaughtering each other in the certain knowledge that they’d have a beer afterwards. You cannot fake that, and no marketing company has ever managed to create it from scratch.
Let’s measure England against that, because that’s the standard. South Africa and New Zealand stood the Rugby Championship down for a year to make room for the tour, two unions giving up a tournament and the money attached to it because six weeks of one high-quality opponent beats four weeks of three. Nothing remotely comparable has been given up at Twickenham in twenty years, where the Premiership opened its season with a polite three-hour content-gathering exercise, players on ten-minute slots so every outlet got its clip out on schedule. It was efficiently-run, and it was flat as a pancake: a room, a rota and a stopwatch. And yes, a press day and a Test series aren’t the same animal. What gives the game away is what each country reaches for when it wants to make an occasion out of something.
The place comes first
The French season came back the same weekend, with wonderfully Gallic volume. Bayonne beat Toulon 27-26 at Jean-Dauger on the Saturday evening, a Rob du Preez penalty with six minutes to go, and Jean-Dauger on a September night with the Basque country in it is not a ground you go to for a quiet sit down. Bordeaux did 64-5 to Racing 92, and on the Sunday night La Rochelle came from 24-10 down to beat the champions of France (Toulouse) 30-27, Hastoy kicking it after the hooter. Nobody had to be told any of it was on.
Charles Ollivon started at seven for Toulon at Jean-Dauger, the town he was born in and the club that made him, twenty minutes from the village he’s from. When I see Charles in the flesh I don’t say ‘salut’. I say ‘kaixo, lagun’. Hello, friend, in Basque, because Charles is from Saint-Pée-sur-Nivelle, a place of 7,000 people, and the Basque country is his entire identity and the reason he plays. What he wants more than anything is to walk down the main street at home with his head up. That’s it. That’s the motivation. He has said openly that after RWC2023 it took him seven months before he wanted to go home, such was his sense of letting the village down.
With a Springbok it’s ‘howzit, boet’. Kolisi is from Zwide, and everything written about him starts there rather than at Western Province or SA Rugby. In South Africa, in New Zealand and in France the place is the unit that matters, and the professional game was built on top of the places rather than in front of them. Everything else follows from that, including the winning, the reason for playing and the cultural pride.
South Africa go looking
Start with the Boks, because they’re the ones setting the standard. Rassie Erasmus has built something that survived a change of head coach, which is how you tell a system from a peak, and the side that lost a twelve-Test run in the opening week of this tour answered it twice inside a fortnight. Form doesn’t do that two weeks running against the All Blacks.
Underneath it sits the most methodical recruitment operation in the sport. The Elite Player Development programme has run since 2015 on a five-year cycle, and SA Rugby puts on three national U15 tournaments a year drawn from schools with four or fewer rugby teams, which is to say from exactly the places a scouting system never otherwise reaches. Damian Willemse came out of that route.
New Zealand have been at it since Bryan Williams
New Zealand are closest to them and the evidence isn’t the last three Saturdays, it’s the last twelve months – underpinned by some 120 years before it. They sacked Scott Robertson, put Dave Rennie in, and the side he inherited went to Ellis Park and ended the Springbok run before taking the series to a final match. The coach is meant to be the variable that decides these things. Here the coach changed yet the level didn’t.
That happens when the players keep arriving regardless of who is picking them, and they keep arriving because New Zealand has been recruiting through the Pacific communities since Bryan Williams, fifty years of the same thing in the same places, and Moana Pasifika sit in South Auckland rather than somewhere more comfortable for a reason nobody there needs explained. Losing Ardie Savea to a shoulder injury for Baltimore hurts, because there isn’t another Ardie Savea, but they’ll still put out a back row most countries couldn’t assemble in a decade.
What a rugby city actually is
Springboks v All Blacks: Seven talking points from Soweto as South Africa go 2-1 up
Stade Toulousain doesn’t just happen to sit in Toulouse. The city is partly built on the success of its great rugby club, and you don’t get on that coaching bench unless you’ve worn the Rouge et noir on the pitch. Jean Bouilhou runs the forwards and holds the club appearance record at 392; behind him stands Guy Novès, who played for the club and then managed it for twenty-two years. Airbus has been a major partner for close to forty-five years, and when the club photographed its new shirt inside an Airbus production hall, alongside an aircraft in assembly, it made the relationship visible. No amount of money gets you through that door, but forty-five years of turning up does. The philosophy passes down like a trade, and it has been passing down since long before anybody was paid to do it.
La Rochelle is more startling still. Stade Rochelais had sold out 112 consecutive Top 14 matches as of January 2026, and they took the ground to 18,000 in 2025 trying to keep pace, in a city of about 76,000. You could put one in four inhabitants inside the Stade Marcel Deflandre on a Saturday and there would still be people locked out. Toulouse lost there on Sunday night, in a ground sold out months before.
England built a league
And to the South Africans, the French and the New Zealanders reading this, and there will be a few of you, yes, we’re jealous. We’d take the trophies as well, obviously, but what we’d actually kill for is underneath them: the school on a Tuesday, the club on a Sunday, the town that empties itself into a stadium and means every minute of it. Any English supporter who has stood in a French ground on a Saturday night has had the same thought on the walk back to the car.
The lazy version of the English half of this says we have no rugby culture, and it’s rubbish. Cornwall took around 40,000 people up to Twickenham for a County Championship final in 1991, out of a county of 550,000. The feeling was never the problem. The problem is that we built the professional game where the feeling wasn’t and left the two of them to get on with it separately.
Start with the schools. Rugby appears on the PE timetable in most state secondaries and in a great many of them that means a fortnight of tag in the spring term. Competitive rugby, meaning fixtures, a season and a teacher prepared to give up Saturday mornings, is much smaller: the RFU’s own report to government in 2013 put it at about 1,500 state schools out of roughly 3,400. All schools launched the year before to add 750 more by 2019, England Rugby Schools now has around 2,000 members with the independents counted in, and we’ve had a home World Cup and a final in between.
So,a boy in an English state school who wants to play has to find a club himself, get there on a Sunday morning and have somebody at home with a car and a free weekend. In Toulouse or Stellenbosch or South Auckland he gets found. Here he has to volunteer. That is why the Sutton Trust audit put around 37 per cent of British male internationals through private schools when the national figure is about seven, and it has nothing to do with private schools producing better athletes. They are the last place in England where the game goes to the child rather than waiting for the child.
Set that against a South African Saturday. Maties, the Stellenbosch University club, runs 31 teams and just over 900 registered players, at one university. Below that sit the schools, and there the schools aren’t a feeder system, they’re the main event: Paarl Boys’ High against Paarl Gimnasium fills Faure Street Stadium with 25,000 people and puts another half a million in front of a television, live on SuperSport, and that is an U19 fixture between two schools four miles apart. The RFU Championship was averaging fewer than 1,300 a match the last time anybody published the number.
Then look at where the professional clubs are. Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford, Liverpool and Nottingham do not have a top-flight rugby union club between them, which is several million people and an enormous number of teenage athletes with nothing professional near them. Coventry lost Wasps, Worcester lost the Warriors and London Irish went inside the same twelve months, and the response was to shrink the league to ten and call it stability.
That’s the whole of it. A French or South African club is an institution its city owns, and it recruits the city back because the two are inseparable in their identity. The English structure treats a club as a business occupying a market, and businesses recruit where recruiting is cheapest, which in England means the schools already supplying pitches, coaches and fixtures. Wigan, St Helens, Hull and Leeds hold more rugby culture per square mile than anywhere south of Coventry and union has never gone into them at junior level with a funded plan, and the Afro-Caribbean communities in the cities were handed to football and athletics while we wondered aloud where all the athletes had gone.
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What the shirt is supposed to mean
Eddie Jones once put the English version of this to me a good deal more bluntly than I’d have put it myself. He asked whether I’d seen Kolisi interviewed after the World Cup, and whether he’d dreamed of winning one as a kid, because Kolisi’s answer, was “No, I dreamed about where the next meal was coming from.” When the worst thing that’s happened to an England player is a detention at school, he asked, how do you get at the emotional intensity underneath when it’s paper thin? I don’t accept that comfort disqualifies anybody, and Dupont is a farmer’s son from the Gers with no deprivation in it anywhere.
But Eddie is touching something real, and what he’s touching isn’t hardship. It’s that a pathway recruiting out of a narrow band of schools turns out players who arrive at the top with a career behind them rather than a place. Ollivon took seven months to go home because he felt he’d let a village of 7,000 people down. You can’t install that in an academy and you don’t need poverty to produce it. You need the game to be what the place is.
The Greatest Rivalry series finishes in Baltimore on Saturday with New Zealand needing the win to square it, and a South African public that has followed every fixture of it will be watching that one too, because what’s being contested was never really the trophy. England has spent twenty years treating a professional league as a development strategy, and that league is now ten clubs it can’t fund at the level of its competitors and can’t persuade the rest of the world to care about. None of it is irreversible, and none of it gets reversed at Twickenham by a head coach or a media day. It gets reversed in Camborne and Redruth, in Wigan and St Helens, in Newham, because that is where the feeling was the whole time, and the professional game has never gone back seriously enough to find it.
