Staff Reporter.
Springbok coach Jacques Nienaber was right to laud his team’s stirring comeback that saw them overturn a 15-point halftime deficit to beat Wales, but his post-match assertion that he didn’t want to talk about the first half shouldn’t mean he is not concerned.
Wing Cheslin Kolbe told us at the Loftus post-match press conference following the narrow 32-29 win that came courtesy of a last-gasp penalty from the boot of Damian Willemse that there were harsh words said at halftime.
“We are grown adult men, so we need to accept it, and it was right that we were taken on about our first-half performance,” said Kolbe.
To be fair, it wasn’t just the first half. In the second half there was a significant momentum shift, but the Boks produced soft moments that kept allowing Wales back into the game. When the Boks scored their second try with 28 minutes to play to cut the deficit to three, it looked like it was game over for Wales and that it would only be a matter of time before the hosts delivered the coup de grace.
That didn’t happen though, and even when the Boks went ahead for the first time in the game, with five minutes to go from a penalty try, they were sloppy. Wales were down to 13 men when replacement hooker Dewi Lake dotted down off a rolling maul to draw the scores level again.
“For a forward pack, that was unacceptable,” agreed debutant Elrigh Louw, who himself came close to scoring what could have been a significant try in his first game in the green and gold.
ORDINARY WHEN STAPLE STRENGTHS ARE FRONTED
Yet that sloppiness can be ironed out. What should be a concern for Nienaber is how ordinary his team looked when the Welsh fronted their strengths, namely the driving maul and the set-scrums in the first half.
The Boks did take control in the second, and of course, the Bomb Squad, the feared forward replacements, had a lot to do with that. Wales were always going to struggle to hold on against the unrelenting Bok physicality and intensity, and the greater forward depth on the South African bench was always going to be a factor.
But it was also a movie that Nienaber would have seen before. Indeed, for most of us South Africans who watch the Boks, it was a movie we’ve seen fairly often – a visiting team from Europe, or for that matter Argentina or Australia, puts up a tenacious fight until halftime, sometimes to the 60th minute, and then falls apart and the Boks take control.
The most memorable instance though was one that Nienaber was part of as assistant coach – defence – to Allister Coetzee back in 2016. It was the second game under the new regime that had taken over from Heyneke Meyer, and the intense need to recover from a shock opening defeat in Cape Town the week before was under serious threat as Ireland went to halftime at Emirates Airlines Park in an even more dominant position than Wales were at the halfway point at Loftus.
In the second half though, the Boks stormed back and won with something to spare as the Irish big men blew air bubbles in the rarified highveld air. The Welsh were blowing air bubbles too in the dying stages at Loftus, and it is why they resorted to the tactics that saw them reduced to 12 men at one point. But a combination of sheer will and the Boks’ soft moments kept them in the game until the hooter.
AN ALLY THAT WILL BE THERE ONLY TWICE MORE
The point is that the Boks had an ally at Loftus that they will only have twice more this season – next week in Bloemfontein and then against the All Blacks in Johannesburg on 13 August – and that they will not have at the World Cup in France next year. And any analysis of their game at Loftus needs to take cognisance of the advantage they do have when they play on the highveld.
That first half was disturbing in the way the Boks were made to look so bereft of ideas and what should also be concerning was that, when they reached halftime, they had enjoyed 60 per cent of the possession and were also dominant in the territory battle. And yet they trailed by 15 points to a Welsh team that had a much more tactically on-point kicking game and which did well to negate the Bok mauling and scrumming strength.
It has long been a concern that the Boks may be exposed when they don’t get the ascendancy their game depends so heavily on in certain areas, and those concerns are not just current ones – in 2009 the Boks ruled the world with a game that revolved around similar strengths to the 2022 team but were then found out by their opponents in a sobering 2010 international season where they slumped from being winners of the Tri-Nations to wooden spoonists.
No one would suggest that will happen now but what the Welsh game did show was that there does need to be more intent to add some different dynamics to the approach and mix their game up more than they did before halftime at Loftus. Nienaber and his assistants probably knew that already, but now it can’t be ignored. In that way, Loftus was a timely wake-up call.