After 108 tests, the most intense rivalry in world rugby, between New Zealand and South Africa, is as keen today as it was when it began in 1921. The most important reason the contests are often so spellbinding is that for year after year, it’s a clash of the two best teams in world rugby at the time.
My fascination with the Springboks began as a 9-year-old gathered with the rest of the family around a valve-driven radio set in the kitchen of our Waikato farmhouse, listening to commentary on the 1956 Boks’ tour of New Zealand. I’ve since had the amazing good fortune from 1965 to watch the All Blacks face the Boks here, in South Africa, Australia, England and Wales from a press bench at the grounds. After two weeks of juggling and revising lists, I believe these are the 10 All Blacks-Springboks tests that have made the biggest impact.
10. The age of innocence
Auckland, 1965
At Eden Park, this fourth and last test of a series was won 20-3 by New Zealand. It was the first All Blacks-Boks test I’d been to. In hindsight, it was also the last time an all-white Springboks team would play here without genuine discontent among many Kiwis over allowing South African apartheid policies to basically have free rein on our rugby fields.
Turning a blind eye was helped at the time by suggestions out of South Africa that Māori players would be welcome on the proposed 1967 All Blacks tour over there. The 1965 tour was over by the time Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd made it clear Māori would in fact not be granted visas.
The Eden Park game itself was a triumph in particular for All Blacks No 8 Sir Brian Lochore. Twelve minutes into the second half, Lochore gathered in a poorly directed Springboks kick 30m from the Boks’ line. He accelerated into an angled, evasive run that Will Jordan fans would recognise, slipping by one tackler, twisting past another and then a third. By now the Boks’ defence was frayed. Lochore passed to centre Ron Rangi, who fed winger Ian Smith, who scored.
The Lochore legend, cemented when he coached the All Blacks to their 1987 World Cup victory, had ignited.
9. Answering the call
Dunedin, 2005
Fired up by their first performance of Kapa o Pango, the haka written especially for them, the All Blacks, Richie McCaw remembers, stood up to the South Africans physically in Dunedin, winning 31-27.
The All Blacks felt they had basically let themselves down when South Africa had beaten them 22-16 in Cape Town, a month before the test at Carisbrook. It was time, they decided, for an old-school arm-wrestle. “Whenever you play South African teams, they always try to bully you,” says McCaw. “No matter what the score is, you always come off sore, feeling beaten up. They can do well doing that. I think in Cape Town we let them do that a wee bit, but in Dunedin it felt like we stood up to them. In the Carisbrook changing shed afterwards we had the feeling that we’d managed to beat them at their game, the game they prided themselves on, the struggle up front.”
8. One for Fossie
Johannesburg, 2022
It’s not unusual for an All Blacks coach to be without the unequivocal support of rugby officials. Laurie Mains was told by NZRU chairman Eddie Tonks that “the shit will hit the fan now” when Mains got the coaching job against Tonks’ wishes at the start of 1992. But there’s never been quite as much public awareness of the gulf between coach and boardroom as there was with Ian Foster.
It came to a head in August 2022. The All Blacks were beaten 26-10 in Mbombela. Their next test would be at Ellis Park. Word leaked that Scott Robertson had been approached to take over. “New Zealand Rugby,” Foster says in his book, Leading Under Pressure, “could hardly have done more to make me feel like a dead man walking.” Cue a unification behind Foster by the senior players, led by captain Sam Cane. The All Blacks played superbly at Ellis Park, and won, 36-21.
Back at the team’s hotel, in New Zealand Rugby (NZR) chief executive Mark Robinson’s room, senior players told him they wanted Foster to stay. The result at Ellis Park, and the players’ endorsement, would lead to Foster being retained for the 2023 World Cup. Sadly, it would be on a basis, as Foster says, of “zero trust” with NZR.
7. Loving the return
Johannesburg, 1992
In 1992, an 11-year break in rugby contact between New Zealand and South Africa ended. In South Africa, apartheid was being dismantled and in May of the following year Nelson Mandela would be elected President.
On August 15, the All Blacks beat South Africa, 27-24, at Ellis Park in front of 72,000 people. All Blacks coach Laurie Mains recalls: “It was a game that ended up reasonably close on the scoreboard, but it never really was close. We were always leading. They got 14 points in the last few minutes, but the game was gone for them.”
Commentor Graeme Moody would later say: “The older players loved the win the most. I remember at 3 o’clock in the morning seeing Richard Loe with his arm round the shoulders of a TVNZ cameraman, both singing their heads off.”
6. The most exciting finish, then smacked legs
Soweto, 2010
Two tries in the last three minutes won the All Blacks this test, 29-22, in front of a massive crowd. With just three minutes to play All Blacks captain Richie McCaw scored to make it 22-all.
In the last minute, Mils Muliana set Israel Dagg (who was subbing on the wing) free. Dagg would later say: “I’m a 21-year-old, excited, thinking about the after-party, where we’re going. Catch this ball, I’m running, and looking around ‘This is pretty cool; 94,000 people. I’m the man here, let’s go!’ So I start raising my arm in the air, yahooing, and then I’m like ‘Wow, I better put the ball down here’.”
He did, the try was scored and the 2010 Tri-Nations won. In the changing shed, Dagg’s floating on air. Then coach Sir Steve Hansen gives him wise advice for the ages. “Don’t you ever do that again. Don’t you ever celebrate before you put the ball down.”
5.) The darkest day
Auckland, 1981
The genius of sport at its best is its ability to unite, as happened at the 1995 World Cup final. The third test, played at Eden Park at the end of the 1981 Springboks tour, was the grim flipside of that.
On the night before the match, I’d spoken at the Eden Rugby Club with two great All Blacks, Sir Colin Meads and Kel Tremain. Late in the evening, Tremain said to me: “Nobody in New Zealand was keener to see the Boks here than me. But now I can’t wait for them to leave. They buggered up our country, and the worst thing is I don’t think they care.”
The All Blacks won the Eden Park test 25-22, and the series, with a late penalty goal, nervelessly taken by fullback Allan Hewson. But opposition to hosting a team from a country where at the time racism was enshrined in the law of the land came to a head in Auckland.
The police started rolling out barbed wire at 3am on the morning of the game. There was a constant bombardment of the ground with flour bombs and leaflets from a Cessna piloted by an anti-tour activist, Marx Jones.
Outside the park, there were violent clashes between the police and anti-tour demonstrators. A police car was overturned and set on fire. A peaceful protester dressed in a clown suit was hit so hard in the head with a police baton his ear drum was ruptured. All Blacks wing Stu Wilson summed it up 20 years later. “I just couldn’t believe what I saw after the game. It was like a war zone.”
4. The All Blacks ‘save our rugby’
Auckland, 1956
The All Blacks won this fourth test 11-5, which gave them their first series victory over the Springboks. At a time when rugby was New Zealand’s secular religion, there’s never been more pressure on the All Blacks. Half a century after the series, New Zealand hooker Ron Hemi recalled: “It was suggested that if we didn’t win, we’d put rugby in New Zealand back 50 years. It was drummed into us.”
A massive crowd of 61,240 people crammed into Eden Park. The game was basically a forwards battle. “Jeepers creepers,” All Blacks first five-eighths Ross Brown would say 40 years later. “It was a huge contest. I was right next to it. It was awesome, I’ll tell you.” A fisherman from Awanui, No 8 Peter Jones, scored a brilliant solo try to win the game – and then either delighted or offended a country where “damn” was still considered swearing by some by saying live on radio: “I’m absolutely buggered.”
3. A heart-stopper
London, 2015
This World Cup semifinal against the Boks, won 20-18 by the All Blacks, was so tight that it took time, if you were a New Zealander, for the joy of the victory to sink in.
Tension? Coach Sir Steve Hansen arrived at the post-match press conference on the third floor of the Twickenham media centre slightly breathless. He apologised, blamed the stairs, then grinned and said: “Don’t want to put any extra strain on the heart after that game.”
Indeed. On their way to winning the Cup, the All Blacks had played some brilliant attacking rugby. After the 62-13 quarter-final demolition of France in Cardiff, the great Wallaby Mark Ella said to me: “The English media will try to say the French were just so bad. Take no notice. When the All Blacks play like this, there isn’t a team in the world that can touch them.”
What was so impressive at Twickenham against the Boks, who looked to smash opponents up front and then kick penalty goals, was how the All Blacks showed they could win a battle of strength as well as skill.
2. Don Clarke was crying
Pretoria, 1996
The quest for a series win over South Africa in South Africa had started for the All Blacks in 1928. Don Clarke, the great All Blacks fullback of the 1950s and 1960s, had toured South Africa in 1960, in a powerful side captained by Sir Wilson Whineray, that included legends like Sir Colin Meads and Peter Jones.
They still lost the series. How much the All Blacks winning this 1996 game 33-26 and so taking the series meant to old players like Clarke was clear when he was invited into the New Zealand changing room after the game. In tears, he said, “Thank you, thank you so much for doing something we tried to do for years but couldn’t achieve.”
Five New Zealand teams had toured South Africa before coach John Hart, and captain Sean Fitzpatrick ran the side that broke the spell. “In ’95 I’d been thinking of retiring,” Fitzpatrick says, “and I remember doing an after-dinner speech, and in the speech saying, ‘I believe this All Black team will go to be one of the great All Black sides.’ Then I thought, ‘Well, hell, why can’t you be part of it?’”
1. Even Dirty Harry gave pause
Johannesburg, 1995
There has never been a rugby game like the 1995 World Cup final at Ellis Park. South Africa itself had just become a totally different country. Apartheid was abolished and Nelson Mandela, a man locked up and vilified for 27 years as a terrorist, was now President.
Rugby had been through upheavals too. The day before the final, the thuggish head of the South African Rugby Board, Louis Luyt, had stunned a media conference with the announcement of a $US55 million ($93m) television deal with Rupert Murdoch which saw the sport turn professional.
At the final, when Mandela appeared in the stand at Ellis Park, the atmosphere was unlike anything I’ve ever felt in sport. The All Blacks had thrashed England 45-29 in the semifinal. In the process, rugby’s first genuine world superstar emerged, a quietly spoken 20-year-old giant from South Auckland, Jonah Lomu.
The All Blacks’ tactics in the final were straightforward: get the ball to Jonah. In the Springboks camp, the response was pretty basic, too. Giant lock Kobus Weise told diminutive wing James Small, who would mark Lomu in the final: “You hang on to him, and I’ll get there and f*** him up.”
Small followed orders, attaching himself to Jonah like a malevolent angel on a Christmas tree. At fulltime, the game was tied at 9-9. Seven minutes before the end of extra time, the Boks’ first five-eighths, Joel Stransky, dropped the goal that won the final and the World Cup, 15-12.
The next day, I talked to the charming African man at the front desk of my motel. He told me joy over the win was so widespread that on the previous night, for the first time since Mandela was elected, it was safe to walk the streets of Johannesburg at night.
Three years later, All Blacks captain Sean Fitzpatrick said in his book Turning Point that on the day, he was deeply disappointed about the result. But with time to reflect, he had decided “it was fantastic to be part of that final”.
“You felt you were part of history, part of another major step in the reunification of a country.”
How much had the match riveted the world? Even Dirty Harry was fascinated. In Hollywood in 2009, Clint Eastwood made a movie, Invictus, about the game.
Phil Gifford is a Contributing Sports Writer for NZME. He is one of the most-respected voices in New Zealand sports journalism.