The All Blacks were beaten in the scrum for fifty minutes and beaten in contact for an hour. They won the first All Blacks vs Springboks Test 33-16, with five tries to one.
Dave Rennie’s first words afterwards were that there was nothing in the game. He was right, and the five moments below are the reason the scoreline says otherwise.
Both sides opened nervously — handling errors, eager penalties, nobody settling. Cheslin Kolbe kicked South Africa ahead on five minutes and Will Jordan answered on nine, finishing from a metre out after Cam Roigard sniped and skipped three forwards with a flat pass. It was Jordan’s 52nd Test try and New Zealand had barely held the ball to that point.
That set the pattern for the whole All Blacks vs Springboks contest. Here is how it played out.
1. Josh Moorby scores against the run of everything — 24 minutes
By this stage the shape of the match was obvious to everyone in the stadium. South Africa were physically on top and the feeling was that the All Blacks would break sooner or later.
Instead they scored again. Tupou Vaa’i carried into contact in the left tram and found an offload back infield, and Moorby finished on his first outing against the Springboks. Ruben Love converted to put New Zealand back in front.
Two visits into the South African 22 in the first half. Two tries.
That is why the All Blacks went in a point down having been outplayed everywhere that matters.
READ ALSO: All Blacks player ratings: front row 4s, a bench 8 and the substitution that won it
2. Jordie Barrett denies Malcolm Marx — 35 minutes
This is the moment that gets forgotten in a seventeen-point win, and it is the most valuable act of the match.
South Africa’s maul motored through the New Zealand pack and Marx crossed the line. Barrett got himself into the contact and disrupted the grounding. Marx spilled it. No try.
The maths matter. South Africa led 13-12. A converted try makes it 20-12 at the interval, and New Zealand come out for the second half needing two scores against a pack beating them everywhere. Three minutes later Barrett stole the ball to end another Springboks siege.
Two defensive acts, no ball in hand, and Barrett kept the Test alive on his own.
3. Fabian Holland charges down Grant Williams — 48 minutes
Kolbe kicked his third penalty on 47 for a 16-12 lead. South Africa had the platform, the crowd and the scrum.
Sixty seconds later New Zealand were back in front.
Williams dallied at the base of a ruck from the restart and took an age to get his box kick away. Holland read it, got his arms up, made the charge-down and gathered the bouncing ball for his first Test try. Love converted.
Rennie knew how cheap it was. Asked about the turning point he described the sequence himself — the penalty, the charge-down, the score — and called it “a bit of a soft one” to concede.
It made the score 19-16, which is the exact scoreline both coaches reached for when describing how tight the Test still was. When the scrum turned a few minutes later, New Zealand were ahead rather than chasing.
4. The front-row change — 54 minutes
South Africa won scrum penalties on 46, 51 and 53. Three times Pieter-Steph du Toit waved away the posts and scrummed again, hunting the card the referee looked ready to produce.
Fifty minutes of going backwards does something to a front row that does not show up on the stat sheet. The legs go first, then the timing on the hit, and by the fourth or fifth reset you are surviving the engagement rather than contesting it. That is where Ethan de Groot, Codie Taylor and Tyrel Lomax were.
The card never came, because New Zealand changed all three of them. Asafo Aumua came on for Taylor around the 54th minute, alongside George Bower and Fletcher Newell.
Two minutes later the All Blacks won a scrum penalty on their own line, their first of the match. South Africa never won another one.
Both coaches picked this passage out independently. Rennie put it at “the 55th minute” and credited the bench. Rassie Erasmus put it at 58 with his side trailing 19-16 and, in his own press conference, called it the moment the balance changed. Neither was asked about the other’s answer.
READ ALSO: Dave Rennie won by 17 at Ellis Park and opened with “there was nothing in that game”
5. Luke Jacobson settles the All Blacks vs Springboks Test — 60 minutes
On 58 minutes Damian McKenzie should have scored. Jordan wriggled free of five tacklers and released him, McKenzie exploded into the 22, and only a hand from Damian Willemse forced the ball dead.
That is the hinge nobody talks about. Survive the five-metre scrum that followed and South Africa take the momentum back — goal-line stand, crowd up, scrum still theirs, Test alive.
They did not survive it. Ardie Savea picked from the base and went himself, dragging in two tacklers and thinning the line, and Jacobson took the pass on the second phase and fell over. Love converted for a ten-point lead.
From there the penalties started going the other way. Quinn Tupaea’s 50-22 on 68 pinned South Africa in their own half, two yellow cards followed on 70 and 71, and Jordan’s second on 75 made it five.
What it changes for Cape Town
Rennie now has a selection problem he did not have on Friday, and it is a good one. His starting front row was beaten for fifty minutes. His replacement front row won the passage that decided the Test. Asafo Aumua, George Bower and Fletcher Newell have all made a case that the men ahead of them have not.
Against that, Ethan de Groot played while ill and left the field after a head clash, and both he and Josh Lord are unavailable for Tuesday and doubtful for the second Test. The decision may get made for him.
South Africa will not change their pack and they should not. What they have to fix sits behind it — eleven entries into the 22 for one try is a half-back problem and a decision-making problem, not a forward one. Expect an unchanged eight and a hard look at 9 and 10.
All Blacks vs Springboks: the takeaway is that they did not break
Strip out the tries and the reason New Zealand won is simpler than any of them. They absorbed an hour of punishment without their heads dropping.
Rennie said it himself, picking out the ten minutes before half-time as the passage that saved the match and refusing to pretend the win was comfortable.
South Africa built the platform eleven times and used it once. New Zealand got nine entries and scored five tries.
The All Blacks did not out-play South Africa at Ellis Park. They out-lasted them, and then they took every chance they were given. That is a harder thing to beat than a good performance, because there is no tactical answer to a side that refuses to panic.
The second All Blacks vs Springboks Test, in Cape Town on Saturday 29 August, will tell us whether it was character or whether it was one night.
READ ALSO: How the All Blacks lost the first hour at Ellis Park and won the Test anyway
