South Africa’s trump card in Johannesburg was the quality and experience they injected off the bench, and the power surge they gained by sending on the famed “Bomb Squad”.
There are multiple strands to explore to explain the 31-27 defeat the All Blacks suffered after leading 27-17, but all of them would lead back to one basic advantage the South Africans held – which was that they had greater strength in depth and were therefore able to make a more significant impact in the final quarter.
Just as many threads again could be explored to determine why it is, again, that one simple reason explains everything – which is that unlike New Zealand, South Africa don’t kill a player’s test career for signing an overseas contract.
And the biggest takeout from the Ellis Park defeat is that New Zealand Rugby’s (NZR) insistence that the All Blacks’ eligibility laws remain fit for purpose was shown to be the self-destructive fallacy it is.
Denying head coach Scott Robertson access to either Richie Mo’unga or Shannon Frizell – both currently based in Japan – makes no sense when considered against the wider context of NZR’s financial master plan of squeezing every dollar it can out of the All Blacks brand.
The commercial strategy will soon collapse if the All Blacks’ win ratio stays at its current 66% level, and it is unfathomable that NZR continues to risk its entire financial future on the All Blacks succeeding, while imposing a selection restriction that is setting Robertson up to fail.
If Robertson was operating with the same freedom as Springboks coach Rassie Erasmus, he could have started the test at Ellis Park with Frizell at blindside, Aaron Smith at halfback and Mo’unga at No 10.
He could even have called upon Brodie Retallick (the big man says he’s done with test rugby but would he feel that way if he was deemed eligible while playing in Japan?) – and while these players may not have necessarily changed the result, they would certainly have given the All Blacks a potentially stronger and more experienced bench to have injected.
The binary argument that the eligibility restrictions fully protect New Zealand’s domestic programme, while opening selection to players around the world would destroy it, lacks reasoned analysis and appropriate framing.
Not every promising local player will run for the hills if they can play offshore and still be eligible for the All Blacks.
The demand will be limited by the budgets of offshore clubs and the common-sense conclusions individuals will reach about their chances of winning test caps if they are not in New Zealand.
And nor does selection eligibility need to have only the two possible settings of open and closed – there are hybrid models to consider, such as imposing a restricted number of offshore selections in any squad or determining the number of test caps players have to win to earn eligibility while at a foreign club.
Nothing has to be absolute, and the South Africans have shown that it’s possible to develop promising young, domestic talent and supplement it with players based offshore.
The other maddening element to NZR’s non-negotiable stance on eligibility, is that it carries what may now be a misguided belief that it is protecting the best development system in the world.
The days of believing that New Zealand’s high-performance network is superior to everyone else’s are long gone, and while it is only one measure, the fact that the Under-20s haven’t been crowned world champions since 2017 is indicative of the general decline in standards.
There is also a growing body of evidence to be concerned by the changed landscape of Super Rugby and legitimately ask that, without the South Africans in it anymore, whether New Zealand’s players are being adequately prepared for all that they will encounter in the test arena.
The All Blacks’ results since 2022 – the first full Super Rugby Pacific season – have suffered a sharp decline in comparison with the years preceding the arrival of Covid.
Between 2016 and 2019, the All Blacks had an 87% win ratio: since Super Rugby Pacific began, it has dropped to 70%.
Break it down further and it shows that the All Blacks beat South Africa six times out of eight between 2016 and 2019, with one game drawn – a figure that has dropped to three wins from eight games since 2021.
When things started to unravel a little in 2022, everyone blamed head coach Ian Foster, suggesting he was the problem, but the issues obviously run much deeper as Robertson’s record of four wins from his first six tests is largely similar. The only sensible conclusion to reach is that while Super Rugby has many qualities, it obviously doesn’t expose New Zealand’s players to the sort of power athletes prevalent in the Northern Hemisphere club competitions.
NZR’s binary argument about eligibility seems yet more flawed, then, when it is locking its players into a competition that seems to have the same delusions of grandeur as Britain’s staunch imperialists who don’t accept the sun has set on their empire.
The All Blacks are likely to feel the sting of defeat several more times this year if NZR maintains its reluctance to believe that it can ride two horses and build a more robust and physically demanding Super competition and yet also sanction a handful of leading players to spend time offshore to refine their set-piece and collision work.
