GAVIN RICH | All Blacks tour exposes flaws in old-fashioned concept

The initial part of Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry tour is over, and apart from the 68 minutes that the Stormers were threatening the All Blacks, the reintroduction of the old-fashioned tour concept has been underwhelming.

The answer was provided in the second half of the third tour game at Loftus in Pretoria, after the Bulls had been mauled by the tourists and were significantly second best. Trailing 24-0 and playing without their Springboks and with a very inexperienced front row, it threatened to get ugly for the Bulls.

However, two members of the current Springbok squad had been called in late in the buildup week to get some game time, and when they were introduced off the bench, the whole balance and momentum of the contest shifted.

The All Blacks still won 50-19 and will feel they ticked several boxes in doing so, but until the last Kiwi try to Wallace Sititi that was the product of inept but also very tired defending, the Bulls had drawn the second half 19-all.

And in that period a previously toothless Bulls suddenly grew fangs, both in their forward game and with the threats they posed at the back. I have a theory about the latter transformation — although Embrose Papier was outstanding in the recent URC season and was the player of the tournament, it has often appeared to me since Paul de Wet moved to Pretoria from Cape Town that the Bulls’ attack looks more incisive when he is on.

He is quicker around the ground and in his service, whereas Papier is more individualistic — and he was in that first half at Loftus, perhaps understandably if you consider he had a point to prove to Bok coach Rassie Erasmus.

Let’s not forget that the Bulls, like the Stormers and Sharks before them, played this game only a few weeks into their preseason. They would have done little work with the ball in training to this point, and, judging from coach Johan Ackermann’s pre-match quotes, he didn’t appear to have prioritised the game as much as John Dobson did in the three weeks he had to work with at the Stormers.

But the best indicator of the tour concept not working anymore was the impact made by the two Boks when they came onto the field. You could argue that the All Blacks were tiring in the second half, but the Bulls did make an undeniable lift once Elrigh Louw and Johan Grobbelaar, who both turned in very busy performances, came on.

So how would these games have gone had more Boks been available for their clubs, which was surely possible given the more than 40 players in the national squad and several of those players based overseas anyway?

It’s actually spectacularly stupid of the tour organisers to think they can reintroduce the concept of the old-fashioned tour but stage it in the off-season of the clubs that play against the All Blacks and play the tour games without the Boks.

It is not as if the warnings have not been there to see in the last few British & Irish Lions tours to this country. Who can remember a stand-out Lions game against a local team from 2009 or 2021?

All Black coach Dave Rennie spoke afterwards about boxes having been ticked; the captain on the day, Codie Taylor, spoke about his team’s improvement since the Stormers game.