RUGBY - Boks will go for broke

Heyneke Meyer did say last week he was confident his side could chase whatever target was set them in the final test the Springboks play in this year’s Castle Lager Rugby Championship provided they were still in with a shout, so the scene is set for quite grand finale at Ellis Park on Saturday.
When New Zealand wing Ben Smith surged through some ineffectual Puma tackling off the last play of the game in La Plata in the early hours of this past Sunday morning, it considerably added to the task facing the Boks when they play the All Blacks.
Yes, they can win the Championship, but to do so they need to win and score four tries in the process, and they need to ensure that the All Blacks don’t get anything.
It’s the achievement of the second task, rather than the scoring of the four tries, that might be the most difficult aspects, and the Boks do have some thinking to do on how to go about repeating the big 40-26 win scored at the same venue in Jake White’s first season in charge back in 2004.

The All Blacks showed again in La Plata that they are masters at exploiting turnover ball, so while the Boks “playing more rugby”, which is the way Wallaby coach Ewen McKenzie described their approach against his team this past weekend, may increase the prospect of a four try haul, it will almost inevitably also offer the All Blacks opportunities.
There were times, particularly later in the game at Newlands, where the rugby played resembled the Sevens approach rather than what you would expect in a test match.
While the yellow carding of Duane Vermeulen didn’t help the hosts, they might have been better off had they been more methodical in their approach rather than giving the impression they were going to swing the ball here, there and everywhere.
They weren’t helped on the day by the fact that the platform that they needed to launch off wasn’t as sound as it had been in Brisbane three weeks earlier.
There were reasons for that, and the French referee could well been at the heart of it. Bok skipper Jean de Villiers was heard complaining to him during the game that the Wallabies were taking the Bok jumpers out in the air.
Jerome Garces was heard on the field ears saying that he would look at it, but there was no evidence that he ever did.
Bok coach Meyer was clearly unhappy about that aspect of the game afterwards, and the fact that Garces didn’t act, but he had to proceed wisely with what he said in this era where referees are considered Royal game and cannot be criticised.
“I was unhappy with the lineouts and it was one of the things that let us down, but there were reasons for that which I cannot talk about,” said Meyer afterwards.
He might just as well have said the same about the scrums, where the Wallabies were allowed to get up to their old tricks of travelling close to the boundary of the law in negating the power of the opposition unit. They appeared to be engaging early and pushing early.
The Boks did come back strongly in the scrums later in the game, and there was no way you could say the Wallabies got the better of them, but the visitors were allowed to be a lot more competitive than they were in Brisbane.
The same applied to their stopping of the Bok mauling, a key part of the South African game, and it contributed to the element of frustration that was allowed in the end to sneak into what was otherwise another dominant Bok performance that again confirmed that, even if they may currently be behind the All Blacks, they are a long way ahead of the other teams in this competition.
FORWARD BATTLE
“The Springboks are a very complete team at the moment and I think it will be tough for the All Blacks playing them on a ground where traditionally they play well,” said Wallaby captain James Horwill, who added at the time that he would have to watch the La Plata game before making a proper prediction about whether the Boks could win the Championship.
If he did stay up to watch that game, Horwill might have said that where the All Blacks have an advantage over South Africa at the moment is that they are more clinical and perhaps still more mature as a team too.
Hitting target off the last move of the game was typical of this All Black team, who were able to score four tries in a match played on a damp field and where for much of the way they came off second in the forward battle.
That last part though is what offers the Boks hope – the Bok pack can definitely improve on the performance turned in against the Wallabies, and would have noted how much the All Black scrum struggled against the Pumas in the first half.
Flip van der Merwe will be the subject of a disciplinary hearing on Monday, but even if he is cleared to play, this might also be a time to reintroduce Juandre Kruger for what he could do to put the All Black lineout, which is still sometimes vulnerable, under pressure.
If the Boks do get significantly the better of the forward battle at Ellis Park, they do have far more attacking teeth than do Argentina, and will make any upfront superiority count much more than the Pumas were able to.
What the Boks need to do before Saturday is figure out how they go about it – it won’t help if they start with massive intensity and score lots of points early but then are tired in the last quarter and the Kiwis grab a four-try bonus point or are able to bounce back to within seven points on the scoreboard.
The Newlands match was a departure from what we usually see from the Boks when they win well. As the Wallaby coach pointed out in the build-up, the scores were relatively close in Brisbane until the last quarter.
But that is when the Boks tend to kill off most of their opponents because of their suffocate, subdue and then penetrate approach.
Against Samoa and against Argentina in the previous test matches played on the Highveld this year the Boks have piled on most of the agony after halftime.
There was a reason for that, and it was sourced in what they did early in the game in ensuring that their opponents weren’t given any space to breathe.
Against the Wallabies in Cape Town the intensity of the constriction process appeared to be released after the first quarter, possibly because the Boks felt their task was done.
Of course what makes Ellis Park more interesting, and what adds another dynamic, is that the All Blacks know they need to stop the Boks scoring four tries.
So they are going to be paying attention to their defensive game and the early constriction, if it happens, might not bother them too much if the Boks aren’t scoring tries in the process.
It is why the Ellis Park challenge is such a daunting one for the Boks.
But then most South Africans would probably agree that just a win would be enough to underline the progress that the team has undeniably made this year, and if they are denied the Championship trophy by a solitary bonus point, everyone will know that it was really Romaine Poite, the man who messed up the Eden Park test, who was to blame.