RUGBY’S GREATEST RIVALRY: Backs to the wall as Springboks’ Rassie admits to being outsmarted by All Blacks

S pringbok coach Rassie Erasmus tacitly admitted that he and his staff had been out-coached by New Zealand counterpart Dave Rennie and his assistants in the first Greatest Rivalry Test. What do the Boks have in response?

In the aftermath of the Springboks’ chastening 33-16 defeat against the All Blacks at Ellis Park on Saturday, coach Rassie Erasmus was typically forthright.

He admitted the All Blacks’ tactics had surprised the Boks and that his team didn’t respond as well as it should have.

Erasmus’ comments were hugely complimentary towards All Black coach Dave Rennie and his team, but there was also a subtext that all was not as it seemed.

“They had a very clever tactic, again – 100% legal – they were stripping in the tackle,” said Erasmus after the match.

“They didn’t tackle like we practised that we thought they would. They were normally either pushing down or chop tackles, and in this game, they had a lot of strips [attacking the ball]. Even the try or the non-try, which we didn’t maul, the ball was stripped right over the touchline.”

By admitting that they didn’t expect the tactic from the All Blacks, Erasmus was conceding that the coaching staff got it wrong.

The reality, though, was that the Boks turned the ball over 23 times; many of those were handling errors, caused both by the All Blacks’ tackling technique and the Boks’ sloppiness.

“A lot of them [turnovers] was because of the good work of New Zealand. The ball wasn’t slippery – we can’t use that as an excuse. We’re not an inexperienced team,” said Erasmus.

“It’s probably the pressure that they put on us, at that different loose play, breakouts, and so on. We didn’t do well there, and they did great.”

Erasmus might be quietly seething at being outfoxed by the brilliant Rennie, and the squad will feel the coach’s blowback this week – that includes analysts, assistant coaches and players.

The Boks entered the All Blacks 22m area 11 times and scored an average of 0.9 points per entry. The All Blacks made only nine visits to the Boks’ 22, scoring an average of 3.6 points per entry. It was a story of wasted chances against clinical finishing.

While some blame referee Matt Carley’s reluctance to issue yellow cards for penalty concessions, the real issue was execution: the Boks were simply not good enough with the ball in hand.

While all the players in the Bomb Squad were familiar names, the deployment of the reserves was unusual and ineffective.