GAVIN RICH: Springboks can turn this result around

Judging from what he had to say in compiling his book, Mitch: The Real Story, former All Black coach John Mitchell would have had sympathy for what the Springbok coaches felt in the early part of Saturday’s game in Auckland.

“There are some days when as a coach you realise quite early that the tide is coming in and you just have to accept it and ride it,” said Mitchell.

The tide wasn’t just coming during the early minutes of the Bok clash with the All Blacks at the Mount Smart Stadium, it felt like a tsunami was. The hosts got the bit between their teeth from the kickoff and in the first 20 minutes their tempo looked set to bury the Boks under a tidal wave of black jerseys.

If you took that 20 minutes on its own, you might agree it was close to the worst quarter of a match the Boks have experienced in the Rassie Erasmus/Jacques Nienaber era. For a while it appeared the grieving Bok skipper Eben Etzebeth, who had lost his father during the week, might be set to relive the experience of the horrific 57-0 defeat suffered in nearby Albany six years ago.

However, it didn’t quite turn out like that. The tidal wave ran out of impetus, and the Boks fought back well enough to suggest that had it not been for the bizarre TMO call against what looked like a good Cheslin Kolbe try and a few elementary errors, they could have been pressing for victory at the final whistle.

Had the All Blacks pressed on to the big win that was threatening, I’d argue that it was a telling blow to their confidence and morale. In the end though it was some way short of being a disaster, and the reason the Bok coaches can hold their heads above water and still see positives is that the contributing factors to the nightmare opening to the game are easily identifiable.

Nienaber, if you read the quotes attributed to him after the game, appears to accept that the selection policy implemented to satisfy the dual purposes of keeping players away from travel fatigue while also growing the international experience of fringe players, may have been what cost his team.

Whereas most of the All Blacks who took early control of the game had been battle hardened and sharpened by their win over Argentina, the bulk of the SA starting team was getting their first feel of a rugby match in this international season.

There was a lot of rust evident in the early minutes against the All Blacks. Against the Kiwis you just cannot afford that. Neither was it the first time in 2023 we’ve seen rust in a Bok performance: there was plenty of it last week in Pretoria too. The Boks also conceded the first try there, and made some errors early on, the difference being that they were playing against the Wallabies on the highveld.

That’s not to denigrate the Pretoria performance. It was on the whole impressive, and perhaps prompted some of us to get ahead of ourselves when it comes to the expectations of the team. The All Blacks, as Nick Mallett put it on SuperSport immediately after the win over the Wallabies, were always going to be a different animal. And they were playing in a city where they haven’t lost since 1994.

So should the Boks care too much about the performance and result? They should care about both, for their stated intent was to win the Rugby Championship, and it will now take a miracle to do that. The performance had too many flaws in it for there not to be concern.

At the same time though, on a day when the Boks gave away early penalties like they were throwing bread to hungry mouths in a fishpond, knocked balls on, kicked directly into touch and missed tackles like someone had shouted “open the gates”, they came a lot closer to beating the All Blacks than the end margin of 15 points might suggest.

The All Blacks did have the composure to still score the points that mattered later on, but there were stages of the second half where it looked like the momentum had swung so completely against the hosts that the 17-point deficit after 15 minutes would be overturned.

Now that they have a game under their belts will the Boks be as poor again? Probably not. Indeed, the first 20 minutes at Mount Smart reminded me of the first half-hour of the Bok win over the All Blacks in Mbombela last August, the only difference being that the South Africans just weren’t quite as clinical with their finishing as Sam Cane’s men were at Mount Smart.

And we know what happened in Johannesburg a week later. I’m not sure if the Boks and All Blacks were set to clash again this weekend I’d bet my money on the same result as the one in Auckland.