RUGBY - Night of double frustration for Boks

No matter how hard the Springboks tried after the Newlands match to put a positive spin on it, the penultimate round of the Castle Lager Rugby Championship was one of double frustration for them.
While the South Africans fell agonisngly short of a much-needed four-try bonus point as they threw everything into the attempt in the last minutes to score the try that would clinch it, the All Blacks went in the opposite direction in La Plata later the same night (or early the following morning South African time).
Whereas for the Boks a four-try bonus looked on for most of the way, for the All Blacks it didn’t.
They had scored only one try when they were ahead 11-9 at halftime – that, a streaky turnover effort off an Argentine mistake in an opening 40 minutes where the hosts dominated the forward battle.

And although they scored twice in succession in the middle stages of the second half to put them within sight of their target, they had to wait for the last move of the match, when Ben Smith – surely the man of the Championship – wriggled up through some tired Puma defenders to cross near the posts.
That placed the seal on a 33-15 victory that puts the All Blacks five log points clear of the Boks as they were four ahead at the start of the weekend.
Which effectively means the Springboks face the task of having to win with four tries and deny the Kiwis any log points at Ellis Park next Saturday in order to win the trophy.
That is a tall order if you consider that chasing four tries will mean taking risks against a team that again showed in the early hours of the morning how adept they are at pouncing on mistakes and turning half chances into tries.
In other words, the Boks can ill afford to adopt a policy of all-out attack in the quest for the four tries as it will offer the All Blacks a chance to score four themselves, and that will mean whatever the Boks do won’t be enough.
Their celebrations after the Smith try spoke of the All Black delight and Kieran Read’s team clearly understand the significance of that extra point. It means the teams don’t line up in Johannesburg, on one of the All Blacks’ least favourite fields, needing to do the same thing.
The bad news for the Boks is that Richie McCaw was in La Plata as a water-boy and according to the New Zealand commentators might well be in line to play next week after apparently making a miraculous recovery from the knee injury sustained in the first-round match against Argentina.
The All Blacks just need a point next Saturday, the Boks need a lot more than that. And if anyone wants to argue against the contention that the South Africans knew themselves that they had blown it at Newlands on Saturday night, try explaining why they looked so subdued after just completing an emphatic 28-8 win over the Wallabies.
POSITIVE SPIN
Although the Boks were doing their best to put a positive spin on it afterwards – and make no mistake, beating Australia by 20 points is always a noteworthy achievement – it was difficult not to spot the subtext of what skipper Jean de Villiers and coach Heyneke Meyer were saying at the post-match press conference.
“We wanted to win the game first, and we knew if we built a comfortable lead we would be able to attack more,” said De Villiers.
“Two tries were scored in the first half so it gave us 40 minutes to score two more. Unfortunately we didn’t do it, although we did create lots of opportunities. We’re still not happy with areas of our game, but we beat the Aussies by 20 points and if we were offered that at the start of the year we would have taken it.
“The bottom line for us, and the way we are looking at it, is that we have won four out of five games in the Rugby Championship and we are in with a chance of winning it next week in front of a sold-out Ellis Park against the World Cup champions and best team in the world. That is a wonderful opportunity for us and it is a measure of our progress since last year. We wanted to still be in the championship after tonight and we have managed that.”
But if truth be told, Newlands was an opportunity missed for the Boks in the sense that they had laid the groundwork in the first quarter-hour for an even bigger win and a definite four-try bonus.
It was like watching a batsman go really well and easily reach 90, and then become becalmed for an hour before getting out just before the century mark. Yes, he did well to get to the nineties, but there has to be abject disappointment that the three figures wasn’t reached.
When the Boks raced to a 17-3 lead after just a quarter of an hour, they looked like they were succeeding with one of the big set-ups of modern rugby, in the sense that they spent the week talking about the need to start conservatively and yet did the exact opposite.
Wallaby coach Ewen McKenzie agreed that the Bok intention was clear from a really early stage.
“When they kicked that first penalty for the touchline it made their intention clear, so we didn’t have to wait long to find out what they wanted to do. They probably played a lot more rugby tonight than they normally do,” said McKenzie.
With Fourie du Preez making the difference he was expected to with his snappy probing, quick-fire service and long passing in the opening half, the Wallabies looked as stunned as the 2009 Australia team were when John Smit’s team came up with a similar surprising approach in Perth.
On that occasion the Boks sustained the intensity and netted the four tries, and perhaps the Boks allowed themselves to get a bit too ragged after building up an early lead and might, in retrospect, have been better served had the slow poison been applied like it normally is.
“We had a lot of leaders who played really well and deserve great credit for the rugby we played in the first 20 minutes, but the Wallabies are a quality side and we made mistakes which prevented us from getting our momentum going,” said Meyer afterwards.
Meyer said he wasn’t allowed to say why the lineouts didn’t work out as expected for the Boks, which is probably an indication he thought the French referee didn’t police them properly.
De Villiers was heard a couple of times during the game complaining that the Bok jumpers were being taken out in the air.
The Wallabies were also up to their old tricks in the scrums, where in the first half they appeared to be getting away with engaging and pushing too early, and this contributed to the Boks not being able to repeat the dominance they enjoyed in this phase in Brisbane three weeks ago.
It was a massive contributor to their failure to gather the momentum they wanted.