Mike Greenaway: Boks' plan will be to squeeze life out of All Blacks

The worst Springbok rugby the world has seen was in the latter stages of the Nick Mallett era, post-Rugby World Cup 1999, when the hitherto successful coach tried to get his players to copy the Brumbies style that was fashionable at the time.

Mallett had taken it upon himself to completely reinvent the way the Springboks played. He liked what he saw in Canberra; he did not like what he saw from his ponderous, uninspired charges and told them that a brave new world awaited them if they would just take off their blinkers.

They tried. There was an unforgettable match in Sydney in 2000 where the Boks tried out their new pattern on the very players they had copied. They got the first part right, the bit where they recycled the ball time after time.

Memorably, on three occasions they took the ball though 20 phases but, unforgettably, the net gain was around minus 2m each time. It was one thing to keep the ball, quite another to know what to do with it. The Boks eventually lost 26-6.

Mallett got fired, the Boks gave it up as a bad joke and there was a reversion to type with mixed, mostly bad, results until Jake White took over in 2004 and through thick and thin stuck with a nucleus of players until the stage was reached where the team was both competent and comfortable in how best to win rugby games for South Africa.

After the 2007 Rugby World Cup, John Smit likened the Springboks' proven ability to suffocate their opposition to the work of a constrictive snake in the wild.

"When we play to our strengths we are like a massive python.

"If you get too close, it wraps you up slowly and starts squeezing. After 50 or 60 minutes the opposition has had bad ball, little penetration, few opportunities in our 22; we have stolen their lineouts, tackled them backwards. They can't breathe, and then they die!"

Smit said there was a beauty in the way the Boks won the World Cup that was not appreciated by superficial observers, and that the genuine rugby aficionado would see art in any form of rugby that was executed to perfection.

The point could be made that the team that unimaginatively flings the ball down the line until the wing is tackled into touch is playing rugby far uglier than a side that prefers kicking perfectly to exert the pressure that ultimately wins territory, possession and the match.

There is more than one way to skin a buck, we are told.

Which brings us to the Springboks in 2009 and the precision kick-and-chase game that smashed all before them in South Africa, but which they could not affect in Brisbane.

This was because their forwards got stuffed, meaning the kickers were unsuccessfully applying their craft while in retreat, and their plight was exacerbated because their usually exceptional chasers, J. P. Pietesen and Bryan Habana, were crocked.

Amusingly, the Wallabies turned the tables and it was the Boks who were trying to frantically run the ball out of their own half, without much gain.

The punchline of this tale is that Smit is going to bring out his python once more. Okay, maybe we should rephrase that!

Smit's Springboks will revert to suffocation rugby at the Waikato Stadium. It is what they know, it is what the Springboks have always known, and it puts trophies in cabinets.

* Mike Greenaway is a rugby writer for the Natal Mercury in Durban, South Africa