Dan Biggar went through the Cape Town Test frame by frame on his own analysis channel and found the reason New Zealand keep scoring against the best defence in the world. It has nothing to do with width, and nothing to do with pace.
Nine tries in two Tests. Against the Springboks.
Every side that has tried to beat South Africa’s rush defence has gone looking for the outside of it. New Zealand won the try count in Cape Town and lost anyway, and the All Blacks attack structure that produced those tries did the opposite. It stopped throwing the ball a long way.
South Africa do have a counter. Rassie Erasmus will not enjoy what it costs him.
The Springboks want you to throw it long
Biggar won 112 caps at fly-half for Wales and toured twice with the British and Irish Lions: fifteen years spent in front of defences working out how far to throw a ball at them. He made the point nobody else made all weekend.
“The Springboks want you to pass, or give long floaty passes, so that when the ball is in the air they can come and take that space. So the longer the ball’s in the air, the more space that they can eat up and the more line speed and the more metres they can take off you.”
Which turns the argument upside down. The Springbok rush gets described as a defence that eats space. It eats time.
Ball-in-the-air is the currency. Every tenth of a second a pass spends travelling is ground a South African defender collects for nothing, running forward while the ball runs sideways. Throw the big flat 15-metre ball into the wide channel and the receiver catches it with Damian Willemse already square in front of him, taking man and ball in one movement. Not a great defensive read. Arithmetic.
So New Zealand stopped throwing it.
“Now the space is on the outside, but what the All Blacks do with their attack is preserve the space brilliantly with short passes… two, three, four short passes… they don’t give the Springboks anything to hit, and they just make sure that they hold their depth… and the ball isn’t in the air for the Springboks to come and defend and smash and take man and ball.”
Four short passes deliver the ball to the same patch of grass as one long one. They take the flight time out of it, and flight time is the only thing a rush defence eats.
Roigard’s try starts a phase earlier than you think
Watch Cam Roigard’s try on 15 minutes again. Biggar starts it before the phase everybody remembers.
“You look at the first play, it’s not coincidental that they’ve targeted Sacha Feinberg[-Mngomezulu] and Damian de Allende in the first ruck. So they’ve got 10 and 12 in that first ruck… and [Cobus Reinach] goes back to the short side… But then Damian de Allende can’t get back up in time to get on the open side.”
Three South African decision-makers gone before the ball has travelled anywhere. The 10 and the 12 buried in a ruck. The 9 pulled to a blind side that was never going to be used.
What is left facing the next phase is forwards, Jesse Kriel, Ethan Hooker on the touchline, and Willemse a very long way back. Then the short passes. Will Jordan runs at an edge with nobody inside to fold across and help him, and the inside ball to Roigard is a formality.
The match feed credits de Allende with a missed tackle on that break; Biggar has him late back into the line. Both readings leave South Africa a body short outside the ruck before Jordan touches it.
Leroy Carter’s try on 65 minutes is the same try wearing different names.
“All Jesse Kriel and all Cheslin Kolbe want to do is they want the All Blacks… to just chuck a long floaty pass into [the] outside channel so that they can keep coming, keep taking that space. But what they do, one short pass, two short pass, three short passes, and all of a sudden Fabian Holland is in that next hole and Jesse Kriel is chasing back, as opposed to coming onto the ball and eating space.”
Chasing back. A blitz defender running backwards has stopped being a blitz defender, and cover defenders arrive late to everything.
“The Boks are the best in the world, but the All Blacks are definitely showing a blueprint on how to attack against this blitz defence.”
Blueprint is the word that should worry South Africa. Ireland, France and England all play New Zealand inside fourteen months, and every analyst at those unions has watched the same two tries.
Biggar credits the man he thinks is behind it, and it is not the head coach. Mike Blair, 85 caps at scrum-half for Scotland and a 2009 Lions tourist to South Africa, joined Dave Rennie’s staff in March.
“The way that they’ve got their passing technique, their passing quality, their skill quality has gone through the roof since he’s walked through the door.”
Read also: Ardie Savea named the way New Zealand lost in Cape Town, and it was not the scrum.
Nick Mallett drew the shape underneath it
Short passes only work if somebody is standing in the right place to catch them. Nick Mallett explained that half on Talking Boks the day before.
Mallett coached South Africa through 17 consecutive Test wins in 1997 and 1998, and later took charge of Italy. He spent fifty seconds on the All Blacks attack structure and almost nobody clipped it, because everyone was busy clipping the scrum row.
“They’ve got a sort of three-wave attack. Their first wave is forwards who come really flat. Then they have the fly-half or centre, like Barrett, for the pullback, and then he’ll have another loose forward and a centre coming hard off him… and then you’ve got the two wingers and the fullback sweeping round and they’re very quick.”
Three layers, and what separates them is depth rather than width.
- Wave one is flat. Forwards on the gainline, arriving as the ball does.
- Wave two sits a few metres back. A playmaker for the pullback, a loose forward and a centre running off his shoulder.
- Wave three is the one nobody in green is looking at. Two wings and a fullback, deep, sweeping behind everything.
RugbyPass tracked New Zealand reorganising their pods around that middle layer this cycle. Mallett’s addition is the third wave, and it is why a rush defence makes the problem worse.
“If you spot tackle inwards, they always seem to find space on the outside to get that ball away, because of the depth of the attack… the final three that come, the two wings and the fullback, are deep, and so they can make deeper passes and they have time… to make the pass and get away.”
Follow it. A blitz defender picks a target and shoots, and every metre he covers going in is width surrendered on his outside shoulder. Wave three stands ten metres deeper than the man he just hit, holding the ball until he has committed.
Nothing here is malfunctioning. The South African system is doing exactly what it was built to do, against the one shape designed to punish it for doing so. How the All Blacks planned to break the Springbok blitz was public two weeks before the series started.
Ethan Hooker found the counter, and he is on the wing again on Saturday
One man in a green shirt solved it, and the solution is not a system.
“Ethan Hooker was absolutely magnificent in the second half… he really did make sure that he only gave him one side, and that was the outside to try and go around him. And he has the pace to catch Will Jordan.”
Hooker stopped shooting, held his width, showed Jordan the touchline instead of the inside and backed himself to run with him if he took it. New Zealand still scored twice after half-time. They did not score down his edge.
The price is a 1.94-metre centre playing on the wing. Ethan Hooker was on the watch list before kick-off for that reason, and South Africa have the option only while Erasmus keeps picking a midfielder out there. He is named at 11 again for FNB Stadium, which tells you what the coaching group made of those forty minutes.
The correction is not more defenders on the edge. That instinct hands New Zealand the middle. Slow the line speed to keep the edge honest and Ardie Savea’s forwards start winning the gainline through the centre of the field, the exact problem the blitz was invented to solve.
Erasmus has to choose which of those he can survive for eighty minutes at altitude, on a dry FNB Stadium surface, with the series level.
The All Blacks attack structure: your questions
What is the All Blacks attack structure?
Three layers of depth. Forwards flat on the gainline, a playmaker and two runners a few metres behind them, then the two wings and the fullback sweeping deep and wide behind everything. Nick Mallett calls it a three-wave attack.
Why do the All Blacks throw short passes against the Springboks?
Because a rush defence turns time into ground. Every moment the ball spends in the air is a moment a South African defender spends running forward, so a long pass into the wide channel arrives at the same instant the tackler does. Dan Biggar’s read is that New Zealand cover the same distance in three or four short passes instead, which removes the flight time and leaves the blitz nothing to hit.
How many tries have the All Blacks scored against the Springboks in this series?
Nine in two Tests. Five at Ellis Park in a 33-16 New Zealand win on Saturday 22 August, four at DHL Stadium in a 33-26 defeat on Saturday 29 August.
What should a viewer watch for at FNB Stadium?
Two things, one at each end of the ball. Count the passes New Zealand throw before the ball reaches the touchline: three or four short ones and the blitz has nothing to hit. Then watch the last Springbok defender on the edge. If he holds his width and shows the outside, as Hooker did in the second half in Cape Town, the deep pass has nowhere to land.
Read next: the All Blacks player ratings from Cape Town, where that back three is scored on what the shape gave them. There is also every fixture, result and kick-off time in Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry if you want the series in one place before Saturday.
Your turn
Two readings of the same nine tries, and both survive a rewatch.
Either South Africa had a bad afternoon on a slippery surface and four tries is four things that happened. Or Biggar is right, the blitz now has a published answer, and holding width is the only counter left.
One of those gets fixed by a video session on Tuesday. The other does not. Which is it?
Dan Biggar’s analysis was published on his own channel, Biggar Thinking: Rugby Analysis, on Monday 31 August. Nick Mallett was speaking to Brenden Nel, alongside Gavin Rich, on Talking Boks, recorded in Cape Town on Sunday 30 August. Match detail from the RugbyPass match feed for South Africa 33-26 New Zealand, DHL Stadium, Saturday 29 August.
