Time for All Blacks, New Zealand Rugby to swallow pride and adopt ‘bomb squad’ approach: Gregor Paul

The All Blacks perform the haka before the Rugby Championship match against South Africa at Ellis Park. Photo / Getty Images

THREE KEY FACTS:

• South Africa have revolutionised the modern game by using seven forwards and one back on their bench.
• France have become recent adoptees and are now favourites to lift the Six Nations Championship.
• The All Blacks have taken a position against the tactic.

When the South Africans started picking seven forwards on their bench at the 2023 World Cup, it clearly offended New Zealand’s sensibilities, as if such a tactical nuance were outside the spirit of the game.

Having seen the All Blacks lose the World Cup final by a point, New Zealand Rugby chief executive Mark Robinson came home from France talking about the need for a global reset — almost suggesting there needed to be a coup d'état at the highest levels to ensure the game was being managed to deliver on a vision of becoming faster and more aerobic.

The narrative was certainly being spun against the Springboks after their successful campaign to become back-to-back world champions — maybe not to taint their achievements, but to cast some kind of aspersion on the way they were going about their business by having such a heavy reliance on raw power.

Now the French are regularly doing precisely the same thing — there are seven forwards on their bench for the final Six Nations clash this weekend against Scotland — and there has not been a peep of indignation from New Zealand.

France also had seven forwards on their bench last week in Dublin, where they produced an astonishing performance of raw power, subtle craft and continuity, but there has been no effort to tarnish the French as rugby troglodytes, or faintly smear their character for deploying such a tactic.

It’s interesting to ponder why not and whether the French have simply managed to legitimise their selection approach by playing a brand of flowing rugby that encompasses all the elements the game affords, or whether New Zealand have developed a significant fear and potential inferiority complex about how brilliantly Rassie Erasmus is managing the Springboks and are therefore determined to hack him down by any means they can.

All roads lead to the latter conclusion, perhaps understandably because a tactic that New Zealanders desperately tried to claim was operating against both the Victorian ethos of the game and its modern obligation to deliver base entertainment to a high-tempo attack blueprint is now being adopted by others.

There is no greater flattery than imitation and so, while New Zealand has tried to push a message of a 7-1 split as detrimental to rugby’s growth mission, the French have rationalised it as a stroke of genius.

Erasmus has gone wildly off-piste at times since he joined the Springboks in 2017 — most notably when he started producing feature-length videos to critique referees — but he is without question the greatest innovator and smartest mind operating in the game today, and the impression is growing that he’s feared within New Zealand’s highest rugby echelons because they don’t have anyone like him.

His impact is as undeniable as climate change. The Boks were a lumbering crew of misfits on a road to nowhere in the years before he arrived — famously losing 57-0 to the All Blacks in 2017 — and then Erasmus took over and delivered two World Cups.

He’s also delivered an unprecedented run of success against the All Blacks in the modern age.

Between 2010 and 2017, the All Blacks won 15 and lost two tests against the Boks. Since Erasmus arrived, the Boks have won seven from 13 and are on a four-match win streak against the All Blacks.

But Erasmus’ impact has been more profound than the results suggest. What he’s done by getting the French to follow his tactical lead highlights how the rugby world no longer looks to New Zealand for inspiration.

Throughout the first decades of professionalism, if there was a trend in the game taking off around the world, it was a certainty it would have started in New Zealand.

It was New Zealand who introduced the double-playmaker concept — first as a 10-12 combination then as a 10-15 partnership.

It was New Zealand who sparked the move to smaller, passing halfbacks with the selection of Aaron Smith in 2012, and it was New Zealand who went through the 2015 World Cup without picking a lock on the bench because they realised the real battleground of that tournament was the tackled-ball area.

But South Africa have now become the great ideas factory and the game’s pre-eminent trendsetter, and the answer to how they have usurped New Zealand lies perhaps in the method each country has adopted in its respective efforts to rule the rugby universe.

In coming up with a 7-1 split and other quirky ideas such as using wing Cheslin Kolbe to throw into the lineout, Erasmus is trying to find ways to work within the game’s legislative framework.

New Zealand, on the other hand, are seemingly determined to change the legislative framework — one nation is trying to innovate its way to success on the field and the other is trying to advocate its way to success in the boardroom.