All Blacks v South Africa: Role reversals leave Springboks as world rugby’s true leaders - Gregor Paul

Siya Kolisi, Eben Etzebeth and Jesse Kriel of South Africa celebrate victory over the All Blacks. Photo / Photosport

THREE KEY FACTS

• For the first time since 2009, the All Blacks have surrendered the Freedom Cup to South Africa
• The Springboks have now won four straight tests against New Zealand
• Scott Robertson’s men have failed to score in the last 20 minutes of all four Rugby Championship tests so far this year

Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and written several books about sport.

OPINION

If there was any doubt about whether the tectonic plates had shifted in world rugby, it was removed in Cape Town.

South Africa demonstrated, with another power and precision performance, that New Zealand is trailing the world champions in almost every facet of the game.

Where once the All Blacks were the world’s great innovators, technical leaders, and strategic thinkers, that title is now bestowed upon Rassie Erasmus’ Springboks.

They continue to be underestimated and derided by a New Zealand public and media who can’t see or respect Erasmus’ rugby genius because of petty-minded spite that they don’t subscribe to some unspecified Kiwi-way of doing things.

For the second week in succession, the Springboks proved to be the better game managers, the more accurate executors in the final quarter, and the more astute decision-makers in the big moments.

These were once great All Blacks traits, but now they are being defined by their ill-discipline and mounting yellow card haul, and most shockingly, by their inability to score points in the final quarter of the big tests.

Who would ever have imagined, trawling back through recent history and recalling the incredible number of times they pulled off final-quarter comebacks, that the All Blacks would be two-thirds of their way through their Rugby Championship campaign in 2024 having failed to score a single point in the last 20 minutes of any of those four tests?

That stat alone tells the story of a team that doesn’t have the depth of personnel, the all-round rugby grooming, the necessary mental strength or inherent understanding of how to take control and fashion the right plays to regain momentum.

Instead, for the second week in succession, the All Blacks produced a compelling first-half performance, in which there were again supremely good passages of fluid attack, only to fall apart in the second half.

And the second-half collapse was again partly self-inflicted, partly induced by the pressure the Boks were able to exert by playing simple, mostly accurate, direct rugby that drew ill-disciplined responses from the All Blacks, basic errors and mounting panic.

No one could deal with the high ball and South Africa won almost every contestable kick. The breakdown turnover penalties that flowed the All Blacks way in the first half dried up, then reversed.

South Africa captain Siya Kolisi celebrates the win in Cape Town. Photo / Photosport

The lineout pressure being exerted earlier in the game suddenly stopped and the super sharp pass and catch that cleverly pulled the defence apart disappeared, only to be replaced by a little bit of angst-ridden snatching that saw balls dropped and opportunities squandered.

From having a solid chance of winning at halftime, the All Blacks were once again in a vicious cycle of compounding mistakes and the inevitability of their defeat was apparent long before Malcolm Marx plunged over in the corner with six minutes remaining.

There’s a quality rugby team buried deep within this All Blacks squad – a side capable of producing multi-faceted, high-tempo attack – but the chances of it ever breaking out and fully blossoming in this World Cup cycle is maybe no more than 50:50.

What the game in Cape Town showed, and indeed what the whole of the Rugby Championship so far has confirmed, is that the All Blacks are paying a heavy price for the executive madness of 2020, in kicking the South Africans out to try to pull off a Super Rugby heist in which New Zealand Rugby (NZR) would control and own a new competition to dangle in front of private equity suitors.

In 2022, when the effects of that decision started to manifest in All Blacks performances that reflected – particularly early in the campaign when players were fresh out of Super Rugby – that the new competition was failing to expose the players to the requisite breadth of styles, athletes and strategic approaches they would encounter in the test arena, NZR identified the coaching group as the problem.

But here we are now, seven tests into Scott Robertson’s regime and he sits on a record of four wins from seven tests, and the problem of why the All Blacks are now staring at a 57% success rate clearly runs much deeper than the make-up of the coaching panel.

NZR can convince themselves that Robertson’s young, emerging All Blacks, led by Tupou Vaa’i, who was again outstanding in Cape Town, and Wallace Sititi, who made his presence felt, will mature and improve throughout the World Cup cycle and close the gap, if not surpass the Boks by 2027.

But the way the Pumas crushed the Wallabies in Santa Fe – scoring 50 points in the second half – alludes to the harder truth, that NZR has tagged itself to a Super Rugby partner that is the sick man of the Pacific, and that New Zealand’s best players are in a testing pool that will continue to produce false positives about how well they are developing.

The South Africans expose their own teams to the heavyweight clubs of Europe, while letting others play for those same heavyweights, and right now, who would say their system of melding all those different experiences, skills and body types together in the Springboks, is not the superior way of doing things?

NZR can fiddle while Rome burns and once again fret about whether Robertson is the right coach.

But the architects of the Cape Town defeat and indeed the obvious demise of New Zealand as a world force, are the executives who saw the arrival of Covid as a chance to make money without ever realising the high-performance consequences of restructuring Super Rugby.