A clip of the All Blacks coach teaching clean-out technique went round South African rugby X this week, captioned as proof he coaches cheating. The footage is not what anyone says it is.
The Dave Rennie cheating video is real footage. The label on it is not.
A clip of the All Blacks head coach teaching clean-out technique went round South African rugby X on Tuesday, captioned as proof he coaches players to break the law. It was filmed at an amateur coaching clinic in Texas. It has been on YouTube since January 2014, when Rennie was in charge of the Chiefs.
That kills most of the argument being built on it. Not all of it. One part of that session is genuinely difficult for him, and nobody sharing the clip has picked it out.
So: does a coaching clip from 2014 tell you anything about a Test in 2026? Have it out in the comments.
You know who doesn't listen to the laws… pic.twitter.com/6Ri2mttJOb
— Piet Pompies Pro Rugby armchair coach (@bokpeiteepompie) September 8, 2026
Watch it before you read on, and watch the middle seventeen seconds closely. The clip runs one minute and nine seconds and it looks like one continuous coaching session. It is not. The front and the back are a coach working with players on a field. The bit in the middle is broadcast footage from a Test match, spliced in, with a Sky watermark still on it and a scoreboard reading 58:32, South Africa 30, New Zealand 14. The words on screen were typed by the man who posted it. Once you have seen the join, the whole thing reads differently.
Where the Dave Rennie cheating video actually comes from
The Texas Rugby Union uploaded a seven-minute video called Dave Rennie Cleanout to its own YouTube channel on 28 January 2014. The description credits the International Rugby Academy of New Zealand for working with the union’s players and coaches.
The union had already written the tour up on 29 August 2013. IRANZ clinics in Houston, Austin and Dallas, run by Jamie Joseph, Murray Mexted and, as its own copy put it at the time, the Super Rugby champion Chiefs coach.
Same field. Same blue shade canopy, same striped brick building, same red cones, same blue tackle pad. One participant appears in both, in the same grey shirt, standing in the same semicircle of watching coaches.
No filming date has ever been published, so the honest version is a session shot in the northern summer of 2013 and online no later than 28 January 2014.
It has surfaced before, too. In November 2018 a 32-second cut of the same session went up on YouTube and was written up by a rugby blog under a headline about a Chiefs coach admitting he tells players not to support their weight. That was a year before Rugby Australia announced Rennie as Wallabies coach on 19 November 2019, and twenty months before he actually started the job.
Read also: Rennie was asked outright whether the Springboks scrum is legal — he answered with a question, then answered properly eight minutes later.
Briefly called it Wallabies training. It was never Wallabies training
The clip was posted on 8 September at 6:03pm South African time by a Springboks supporter account, with a five-word caption about who does not listen to the laws. By Thursday it had passed 79,000 views.
SA Rugby magazine picked it up the next morning under the headline “Watch: Rennie coaching players to cheat”. Its entire article is one sentence and the embedded post. It makes no claim about where the footage came from, and it never uses the word Wallabies.
Briefly.co.za did. Its write-up, published two hours later, calls it a video from Rennie’s Wallabies days and describes it twice as a Wallabies training clip, without citing a source for either statement.
Rennie coached Glasgow until 2020. He was announced by Rugby Australia in November 2019 and took charge in July 2020. The footage was six years old and publicly posted before he ever took an Australian session.
The clip going round is an edit, and the middle of it is a Test match
The version doing the rounds runs one minute and nine seconds. It is three pieces of video, not one.
The first half-minute is clinic footage. Then about seventeen seconds of broadcast Test footage between the Springboks and the All Blacks, carrying a Sky watermark and a scoreboard reading 58:32, South Africa 30, New Zealand 14. Then a title card, then the last nineteen seconds back at the clinic.
The subtitles on screen were typed by the account that posted it. They are not broadcast captions and they are not a transcript.
None of which makes the coaching in it fake. It does mean anybody quoting a line off those subtitles is quoting a Springboks supporter rather than Dave Rennie.
The part that actually hurts him is the part nobody is quoting
The loud accusation is about the clean-out: shoulder dropped, work low, get around the knees. It is on weak ground. World Rugby only made it a penalty offence to drop weight onto a jackler or target his lower limbs on 1 July 2022, under Laws 9.20(d) and 9.20(e). In 2013 the low clean-out was taught in every hemisphere. Coaching it then is not evidence of anything now.
But the 2018 cut of this session was not headlined about clean-out height. It was headlined about a jackler not supporting his own body weight while appearing to.
That one has no expiry date. A player over the ball has had to support his own weight since long before this footage existed. It is not a law that changed in 2022, and a coach explaining how to look like you are carrying your weight when you are not is describing how to beat a referee, in any decade.
Which is the argument South Africa should have made, and did not, because it takes longer than a caption.
The knee that changed the 2022 law belonged to New Zealand
There is a second thing missing from every version of this story.
Ten weeks after the jackler law came in, Wallabies lock Darcy Swain cleaned out All Blacks centre Quinn Tupaea at the leg in the Bledisloe Test at Marvel Stadium on 15 September 2022, a game New Zealand won 39-37. Swain saw yellow on the field and got six weeks from the citing commissioner.
Tupaea was first diagnosed with a ruptured medial ligament and a partial tear of the anterior cruciate in his left knee. Later scans found worse. He was out for nine months.
The head coach who had to answer for it that night was Dave Rennie.
“I’m not convinced about Darcy’s [yellow card]. It was certainly nothing intentional. Ironically, he got neck-rolled prior to him cleaning out, but that wasn’t picked up.”
Rennie said that in post-match media, as reported by ESPN{rel=”nofollow”}; the bracketed words are ESPN’s. Four years on, an All Black’s knee is still the injury most often cited as the reason that law reads the way it does.
Why it surfaced in Baltimore week
The post was not a bolt from nowhere. It was a reply.
The account it was replying to had spent that afternoon mocking South Africans for citing Kyle Sinckler, after an England tighthead had gone through the South African scrum frame by frame and told them what they wanted to hear. The Rennie clip was the return serve in a thread, not a piece of research.
That is Baltimore week in one exchange. Springboks assistant Felix Jones queried New Zealand’s breakdown work before the series. Rennie said South Africa’s scrum walks around at the put-in. Nick Mallett said on television that the All Blacks were cheating by collapsing, and a New Zealand prop sat through the lesson on live television.
South Africa lead 2-1. New Zealand took Ellis Park 33-16 on 22 August, then lost Cape Town 33-26 and Soweto 29-24. Saturday at M&T Bank Stadium decides whether it finishes 3-1 or level, and it is the first time the All Blacks have played in Baltimore.
Rennie’s own numbers are the hole in his defence
None of the above leaves him comfortable.
New Zealand have conceded 34 penalties across the three Tests to South Africa’s 26. In Cape Town it was eight to five, seven of the eight inside their own half, and Cheslin Kolbe kicked four of them. Nobody publishes a breakdown-only split, so nobody can say how many came at the ruck — but a side giving away that many while its coach questions the opposition’s technique has a tone problem at minimum.
His own forwards coach named the breakdown as New Zealand’s problem area before a ball was kicked.
And there is a fair reading that says habits outlive laws. A generation coached to go low at a jackler in 2013 did not forget it on 1 July 2022. Technique lags legislation, always, and Rennie coached a lot of players in those years.
Nobody has put any of that to him. He has a press conference in Baltimore and somebody should.
What to watch on Saturday
Referee attention at the breakdown sits on the second man in, not the tackler.
Watch the clearing player’s chest at the moment of contact. Below the jackler’s hips with the arms wrapped is legal and always has been. Arms trailing, or weight dropping onto the back of the legs, and it is a penalty inside South Africa’s half.
Then watch the jackler himself. Feet planted, weight through his own legs, hands on the ball is a turnover. Leaning on the tackled player and calling for the whistle is a penalty the other way, and it is the offence this whole story is really about.
Read next:
– Eben Etzebeth rates Saturday above two World Cup finals. The reason is not sentiment
– The scrum fix the panel demanded never made the plane. New Zealand went the other way
– Both camps called this series for Baltimore weeks ago. Only one ruled out a draw
Frequently asked questions
Is the Dave Rennie cheating video real?
The footage is real and so is the coaching. What is wrong is the framing. It comes from an International Rugby Academy of New Zealand clinic in Texas, uploaded by the Texas Rugby Union on 28 January 2014, when Rennie was Chiefs head coach. The clip circulating on 8 September 2026 is an edited cut with subtitles added by the account that posted it.
Was it filmed during Rennie’s time with the Wallabies?
No. It was online more than five years before he took charge of Australia in July 2020, and a 32-second version of the same session was published in November 2018 describing him as the Chiefs coach. Rugby Australia announced his appointment on 19 November 2019.
Does the clip show illegal technique?
Partly, depending on which second you watch. Cleaning out low at a jackler only became a penalty offence on 1 July 2022 under Laws 9.20(d) and 9.20(e), so coaching it in 2013 broke nothing. A jackler failing to support his own body weight has been an offence far longer than that.
What is the jackler protection law?
The jackler is the first team-mate of the tackler to arrive at the tackle. Opponents may drive him backwards but must not roll or twist him, drop their weight onto him, or target his lower limbs. Both clauses carry a penalty. It became full law on 1 July 2022, one of five global law trials promoted together.
What happened to Quinn Tupaea?
Tupaea’s left knee was wrecked when Darcy Swain cleaned him out at the leg in Melbourne on 15 September 2022 — a ruptured medial ligament and ACL damage that kept him out for nine months. Swain, then coached by Rennie at the Wallabies, was suspended for six weeks.
Where and when is the fourth Test?
Saturday 12 September 2026 at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore, kick-off 5pm local. South Africa lead the four-Test series 2-1, and a New Zealand win would square it at 2-2.
Your turn
The clip is twelve years old and was mislabelled by everyone who shared it. The line about not supporting your weight still landed. Does the age of the footage get Rennie off, or does the fact that he was teaching it to amateurs in Texas make it worse?
