Online Reporter
THERE’S been an assumption that the Springbok’s visit to the New Zealand fortress of Eden Park at the beginning of September will be the biggest rugby international of this year and arguably the biggest since the World Cup final.
That may remain true from a global perspective, but for the South Africans, today’s game in Cape Town may have become even bigger.
It’s not just the chance of retaining their Castle Lager Rugby Championship title that will go out of the window if the Boks somehow conspire to lose again to Australia at the DHL Stadium.
So will a considerable part of their aura as the world’s leading team, and the confidence of both the players and the South African public that supports them.
Experienced centre Damian de Allende may have summed up the mood when, during the week, he said that the attitude of their supporters to the Boks felt very different to the players in comparison to the last time they were in Cape Town after a chastening defeat.
That was in 2016, when they lost to Ireland, the first time ever that the Boks had lost to that nation on home soil.
According to De Allende, nine years ago, the players were sworn at.
This time, when they go to the gym or out for a coffee around the team hotel on the foreshore, they encounter the same love that there was before the shuddering wake-up call that was delivered by the Wallabies in Johannesburg last week.
And there’s a good reason for that. One defeat doesn’t make you a bad team, no matter how bad it is. Not when you’ve won most of your games before that over a long period.
Plus, it was pretty obvious what happened at Ellis Park — yes, the Wallabies played well, but coach Rassie Erasmus was not clutching at straws or making any kind of false claim when he stated that the Boks had simply overplayed and, in the process, run themselves off their own feet.
Most of the media match reports written before Erasmus even spoke at the post-match press conference would have said the same thing, and his opposite number in Australia’s coaching box, Joe Schmidt, followed the same theme when he suggested that the Boks got seduced by how easy it was for them early doors.
Schmidt said that in his many years in rugby, he’d seen that happen, and so have most of us who have followed the game over a long period of time.
You have the momentum, you think you are so on top that you can, to use a cricketing analogy, start reverse sweeping everything. Suddenly, you don’t have the momentum anymore, the opposition do, and it is difficult to regain it.
Or you find it is too late to recover, as was the case after a flurry of tries suddenly turned a Bok lead into a deficit in Johannesburg.
So it is easy to write off last week as an aberration. This might come across as very un-South African, but you could easily suggest that it might have been a good thing for the Boks.
Now that they have had their wakeup call, there will be no complacency or arrogance, and it might be a good thing for them to be going a fortnight from now to Eden Park, where New Zealand haven’t lost a test match since 1994, without the burden of being the favourites.
There’s nothing that galvanises South African sportsmen, and particularly rugby players, than feeling like they are in a backs-to-the-wall position, and last week’s result has conspired to make today’s game far more interesting than it might have been had the Boks done what they were en route to doing before half-time last week of running up 50 points against the Wallabies. — SuperSport.
