Another heavy Springbok defeat appears to be in the offing with the All Blacks looking to reap the rewards of a new management strategy, writes JON CARDINELLI.
On Monday, All Blacks coach Steve Hansen spoke about the respect that the visitors have for their Springbok counterparts. Flanker Sam Cane hit back when someone suggested that the rivalry between New Zealand and South Africa is dead.
The All Blacks will be looking to honour that New Zealand-South Africa rivalry by playing as hard as they possibly can at Newlands this Saturday. That is a frightening thought for South African fans, and perhaps for the battered Boks themselves.
The All Blacks have already won the Rugby Championship. They have nothing to prove in the final game of the tournament. They could probably afford to rest players of the quality of Sam Whitelock, Kieran Read and Beauden Barrett and still come away with a 10- to 15-point victory.
But the All Blacks haven’t come to Cape Town for a holiday. They aren’t looking at the coming game – effectively a dead-rubber – as an opportunity to blood youngsters and experiment. Hansen, fighting the effects of travel fatigue himself at a press conference on Monday afternoon, made this crystal clear.
It was interesting to hear Hansen explain why the All Blacks sent one group of players to Argentina (for the match against the Pumas) and another five-man party to South Africa nine days before the Test in Cape Town.
Cane, Whitelock, Ryan Crotty, Liam Squire and Lima Sopoaga were in high spirits when they welcomed the rest of the All Blacks to the team hotel on Monday. Those five players haven’t played a match for two weeks and haven’t been forced to travel from New Zealand to Argentina and then from Argentina to South Africa in a short space of time.
ALSO READ: All Blacks target final flourish
Hansen hopes that this strategy will have further benefits when the All Blacks tour Europe later this year. Again, it was interesting to hear the message behind the message. Not content with their performances in the northern hemisphere in 2016, the All Blacks have developed a management strategy that may allow them to maintain their awesome intensity levels throughout the 2017 season.
So what does this mean for a battling Bok side ahead of the coming clash at Newlands? It’s not good news.
As Hansen said on Monday, the All Blacks will only know if this strategy has been successful or not when they assess all of the relevant data at the end of the 2017 season. What they need to keep doing in the interim – and unfortunately for the Boks, in the next game – is selecting a strong side and striving to maintain those incredibly high standards. A complacent performance, even in one match, may compromise this long-term management project.
A lot’s been said about that 57-0 result in Albany three weeks ago. Neither the All Blacks nor the Boks have come out and said that the South Africans were unforgivably poor across the contest.
In fact, coaches and players in both camps believe that the opposite is true, that the Boks did some good things in that fixture and that they are on the right tactical track.
Perhaps it’s a bit of gamesmanship on the part of the All Blacks. There’s another way of looking at it, though: the Boks played as well as they could have played and they still conceded eight tries, scored zero, and lost by 57 points. That is a damning indictment on the current team and the South African rugby system as a whole.
We can expect to hear a lot more about how much the All Blacks respect the Boks and about how they will have to work for the result at Newlands. That may be true up to a point.
The All Blacks are the best side in the world, though, and are constantly looking to stay two or three steps ahead of their closest rivals (England and Ireland at this stage). They have grander ambitions than another win against the Boks.
On the other side of town, we can expect more contradictions. Coach Allister Coetzee has got into the habit of following every statement regarding the Boks’ chances of beating the All Blacks with a list of reasons why they won’t – injuries, the state of the South African system, and so on.
Coetzee has assured reporters that he is not feeling the pressure. He has brushed aside the criticism of an all-out running approach that has backfired in recent games.
One would hope that the Boks will come to Newlands with a clear plan in mind and the belief that they can stop the All Blacks juggernaut. At the moment, however, things do not look good for the Boks.
ALSO READ: Boks won’t be conservative
Photo: @Springboks/Twitter
