Gap widens between Boks and Blacks
6 Oct 2012
RYAN VREDE writes the Springboks regressed dreadfully on attack and defence and they are now even further from their goal of overhauling the All Blacks as the pre-eminent team in the game.
Having watched the Springboks run in six tries against Australia at Loftus, I wrote last week that their defensive showing was far more impressive. I said this because it is the bedrock upon which sustained success against the game’s elite is built.
The Springboks end the Rugby Championship having conceded 10 tries in their six Tests. To put that into context, the Blacks (the best defensive side in the competition) conceded six. The Boks’ defensive effort today was woeful, missing 12 tackles, crucially half of those coming in their own 22m.
For the first try Jaco Taute’s failed touch-finder presented the Blacks with a broken field opportunity, the kind they relish, and they were duly punished. There was criticism of Bryan Habana for the second try, but that criticism should have been of his failure to make the hit, not that he pushed out of line in an attempt to do so. There was a three-man overlap. It was the right decision.
Straight after the restart the Blacks were at it again, Taute this time missing his hit in midfield. The Boks were all at sea for the fourth, made to look like rank amateurs.
If the Boks want to become the force they envision, a start would be that no side should come to South Africa and score four tries. Not even the Blacks.
They can draw confidence that there aren’t terminal flaws in their defensive system. There were soft tries in Dunedin and Perth before this. In this youthful team’s short time together they will have already learned that at this level the margin for error is fine, with victory and defeat potentially resting on a single error. They cannot continue to make these mistakes.
The addition of Francois Louw certainly helped their defensive effort. However, the Springboks didn’t win nearly enough of the gainline battles to amplify Louw’s potency in this area tonight. They started promisingly enough, but a sustained effort is what was required. With elite teams so sophisticated in this discipline, the opportunities created from pressure defence will account for more of their scores than intricately worked moves will.
On attack it was a frustratingly familiar story. There were once again missed opportunities, but not enough to have altered the result.
The Blacks out-thought, out-muscled and out-mongrelled them at the breakdown, never allowing them to get any flow or tempo into their attacking game. The legality of some of those ruck steals or recycle slows was questionable, but Test rugby is often a street fight, and today the Boks brought a plastic baton.
Their brute force in contact will win some games against weaker opponents than the Blacks in the years ahead, but there needs to be a greater coaching focus on intelligence going into the contact area and awareness when in the tackle. This was the standout feature of the Blacks’ attacking play this evening. Where the Boks’ carriers look to steamroll their way through a tackle, the Blacks attack the space either side of a defender so well, allowing them to free their hands and have the option of an offload. The support play for that option is never lacking, and herein lies a valuable lesson for the Boks.
The Blacks are the benchmark for this Bok team and this evening they looked impostors to their throne. The log reflects a 14-point different between the teams, but the gap is much more vast and will continue to grow if the Boks don’t address pressing issues with great urgency.
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63 Comments
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7 Oct 2012, 10:36 am
Rangerman – WP players were the problem? You’re seriously delusional. Stop your petty provincialism dude. Vermeulen and Etsebeth got through more work than any in the pack. Habana is the only Bok backline player with any penetration. How hopeless were the Boks when Sharks and Bulls players dominated the lineup? Rather focus on a poor management team.
7 Oct 2012, 15:23 pm
Gap widens between Boks and Blacks????? Is P duh right? The only way to beat the Blacks is with blacks?
7 Oct 2012, 15:26 pm
more blacks v all blacks. That would be cooooool
7 Oct 2012, 19:16 pm
@W.P-51: Agreed. Management team is a bunch of second raters. Heyneke’s praise singers should be deported back to the Bulls’ camp. Loud mouth Van Graan inherited the best pack of forwards in the world (Bakkies, Victor, Danie, Guthro) when he became the Bulls’ forward coach. The next thing we notice is that Uncle Heyneke promoted him to the Bok forward coach. If this isn’t vintage Broederbond tactics, what is?
7 Oct 2012, 20:42 pm
yeah, the problem is Ryan, the mentality is consistant to what you guys wanted. When Div spoke of running at space you guys spoke up the ‘traditional strength’ argument. When the rest of the world values skill over bulk, Meyer values bulk over brains. Stop the mentality that games are purely won and lost up front, they do lay the foundation, but the bulk of your points has to come from 9 to 15, and thats what wins you matches, not purely territory or posession, or upfront dominance but points. The likes of Gerber,blanco and cullen.. We need brains…
7 Oct 2012, 22:42 pm
again, for all of oru big players that should be able to power intp gaps and free their arms up for an offfload, we did not seen ay offloading. the one move that included it was a try.
By now we should know that the AB’s are highly trained in slowing and stealing ball at the breakdown, by whatever means possible – that means we should avoid teh breakdown at all costs by offloading.
8 Oct 2012, 02:54 am
The Boks backline has been an endemic problem. They never sorted it out even when we had some of the best forwards in the world. The reason we’re “rebuilding” is because there was no foresight to begin with. Has there ever been a “weak” AB team? No. Even when they’re rebuilding, they remain immensely competitive because they’re continuously drafting in new players and managing them well. Graham Henry traveled to the US to learn from the NFL. Even though the ABs were already excellent, he was still looking at other ideas to solidify them and improve them further. In SA we keep talking about our “traditional” strengths – which, without innovation are fast turning into our weakness, because it’s all we know. There is no sense of development, no one appearing to take a really hard look at our game and asking “what’s missing?” And “what’s missing” is abundantly clear. We are one-dimensional, our selections are off, we have no coherent backline nor backline play. We doggedly insist on doing things our way when an injection of techincal nous from someone like Plumtree or Mitchell might really help. Is it a surprise that the Sharks played so well in the Super 15? They have a Kiwi coach and we have players who can offload and play exciting incisive rugby…except when they show up in the Bok team. As has been pointed out recently, the Kiwis manage their players better. We have far too many key players injured for it to be merely due to chance. Until we rectify these things and add what’s missing, we will continue to stagnate. It’s amazing that we go through the same soul-searching year after year and never really see progress in our game or our approach to it. Everyone is so worried about our inability to play like the ABs, so they default to this nonsense about our “traditional” strengths. The definition of a delusion is adhering to the same beliefs against all evidence to the contrary. Our focus on these so-called Traditional Strengths is preventing us from developing new strengths and new traditions.
8 Oct 2012, 04:25 am
Spot on Rex.
8 Oct 2012, 05:22 am
I agree rex – its like we dont have the current personell to do anything about it, so we hide our head in the sand . I refuse to believe that we dont have a single coach in the whole republic that can understand and manipulate backline processes and work out and coach good set pieces. Our highschool rugby has great running in it, and good set piece moves. But at higher levels, the level of understanding and coaching and adaptability of players does noot seem to go up. its still viewed as a “intuition thing”, which a player eaither has or has not.
Frankly thats rubbish. Why is there no S African that has made a science out of it?
8 Oct 2012, 06:28 am
When Heineken moved up from success at Currie Cup to a greenhorn at Super 12 level, his Bulls team won only 2 out of 22 games over two full seasons, and they got the wooden spoon.
The man is a VERY slow learner. His record proves it.
And that there is a substantial gap between Currie Cup rugby and Super rugby is nowhere in dispute. Nor is the fact that the step up to test rugby is an even larger step. Once again, just like the last time, Heineken has fallen feel first clean through the cracks. And he denies it has happened. He cannot grasp that he just doesn’t have the coaching nous to hack it among proper test coaches. His tenure will, once again, involve a l-o-n-g learning curve and he sees nothing wrong with using the lucrative test coach position as an experimental kitchen and a personal development laboratory.
He says “the players have faith in me” as if his rugby tuition is some sort of religion into which devotees have to show prior commitment in order for the magic to work. It doesn’t cross his mind that if any player dared contradict or scoff at his “system” he’d drop them and they’d lose lots of money. So they have no choice but to pretend he’s their messiah.
Hallelujah, Heineken! Huzzah!
Yeah, right…
8 Oct 2012, 08:10 am
heyneke out!
8 Oct 2012, 08:25 am
Sjambok – I think you are probably correct. There are definitely people who understand the problems; whether they’ll get a look-in at the coaching level is another matter. Cobus Visagie is a pretty astute analyst if you’ve seen any of his columns. I have no idea whether he can coach. Alan Solomons is another – and he does have a record as a coach.
People keep talking about Mallett. Well it’s not as if he didn’t make his own major mistakes- getting rid of Teichmann at a most inopportune time has to be the main one. He has a huge ego, with all his rugby smarts, and that can get in the way.
Naka Drotske’s team plays good rugby. The question is whether their defensive liabilities would be replicated at a higher level or whether with the righ defence coach, they could find the right balance. We have David Campese resident in SA. Could he be helpful? Who knows. Why isn’t the rugby fraternity seriously considering personnel who could sort out these problems?
So there are people around. Mitchell and Spencer might be helpful as consultants. Everything should be considered. But the problems are glaring and until we face them and solve them, we will never reach our potential as a rugby nation, or we will never know what it truly is.
8 Oct 2012, 09:21 am
Sad to say, but we will never catch the ABs. We may achieve parity for fleeting moments as they go through change-of-the-guard periods. But as soon as their team settles, we will remain no match.
That is until there is a radical mind-set change in our own rugby philosophies. I will continue to hope, as there are signs of such change at domestic level. In the Currie Cup, more and more teams are adopting a ball in hand approach. It is the difficult route to success, but one that promises to take our rugby to a higher level of sustained excellence. For too long we have hoped and prayed for that messianic player that can win a game on his own. For too long have we gone into matches with the mindset of dominating up-front being the be-all-and-end-all. It is time to realize that at the highest level, one can never guarantee upfront dominance for 80 minutes, and even if this were possible, the result is still an uncertainty.
One difference between NZ and SA rugby philosophy is clearly visible when noting the crowd reaction to drop goals. In NZ it is met with a mixed response, while in SA, especially up north, crowds get all excited as though this were the be-all-and-end-all of the game.
Personal perception is that in SA crowds don’t really care how a win is achieved. It is great to win, but if it all depends on one or two players, anyone can see that sustained success will remain a pipe-dream as players are injured or experience loss of form.
The ball-in-hand approach demands a greater level of team cohesion, taking the game to its ultimate level. One can draw the analogy with soccer, which is dubbed by its fans “the beautiful game”. It is indeed a beautiful game, but only when the teams involved produce seamless passing moves to create scoring opportunities. It becomes something less beautiful when dominated by individuals.
So why have we never really bought into the ball-in-hand approach? Simple, it requires too much work. It requires for players to develop a psychic understanding with their team-mates. It requires for players to believe and be encouraged that creating opportunities for team-mates is as gratifying as scoring the points themselves. It requires for players to develop and master all the skills they should have gained at age-group level. To coaches, this could possibly seem a daunting task, especially when senior players still cannot do something as elementary as passing to both sides. No, the more individualistic crash-ball and kick-and-chase approaches can yield the result, be it that these are non-sustainable. It is the game at its most primitive level…
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