Aaron Smith won 124 caps at halfback and spent eleven years being sent at the best defence in the world. On the Aotearoa Rugby Pod he gave away the whole method, and it is four words long. REVIEW: Thursday 27 August.
The instruction is not “break them”. Nobody breaks South Africa. Teams have spent eight years trying and the ones who got closest were doing something else entirely, something quieter, and the objective at the end of it was never a line break at all.
It was a kick. Theirs.
How to beat the Springboks is a question with a hundred fashionable answers, most of them about tempo and width and tiring the big men out. Aaron Smith needs one sentence, and it ends with a boot. The most-capped All Blacks halfback in history, 124 Tests, a World Cup winner in 2015 and a losing finalist against these same opponents in 2023, sat down on the Aotearoa Rugby Pod hours after the first Test and talked for forty minutes about a side he was sent at more often than almost any Test halfback alive. Most of it was warm. Some of it was funny. Buried in the last ten minutes was a working blueprint that nobody in either country has printed.
Add a winning margin for points
New Zealand won 33-16 at Ellis Park on Saturday 22 August, five tries to one, ending a twelve-Test Springbok winning run. The scoreline says demolition. The first hour says something closer to survival, and the site has already gone through how the All Blacks lost the first hour at Ellis Park and won the Test anyway. What Smith adds is the reason the survival worked.
The blitz has a clock on it. Almost nobody says so out loud.
Start where every side that plays South Africa starts, which is terrified.
The rush comes off the line in a block, the 12 and 13 are on you before the ball is, and the received wisdom is that it stays like that for eighty minutes. It does not.
“The attack against them, the first 10 or 15, generally they are very up… I always felt bad for the boys, because that’s when they were off, like they are going to rip you apart. But it does lessen.”
That is a very large concession dropped into the middle of a podcast. The blitz has a clock on it. The most dangerous version of the Springbok defence is the one that runs out for the first quarter, and a team that survives that quarter is not facing the same defence at minute 50.
Ellis Park backs him. South Africa led 13-12 at the break and were still ahead 16-12 early in the second half. New Zealand did not win that Test in the opening twenty. They got through it.
What to watch on Saturday: the distance between the Springbok 12 and the offside line at the first three lineouts, then the same three lineouts after the half-hour. If the second set is a metre deeper, the clock has started running.
Everything the visiting side does in that first quarter should be built around not losing, which sounds defeatist until you notice that the plan the All Blacks took into Ellis Park was constructed on exactly that logic.
Two phases beat ten. This is the part that sounds wrong.
Here is the piece of it that contradicts almost everything said about South Africa on television.
The standard analysis says you tire them out. Big men, big collisions, get the ball moving, phase after phase, and eventually the size becomes a liability. Smith has watched that theory get people beaten for a decade.
“Everyone thinks bigger men mean speed will score you tries, and eventually they’re not that big and they’re not that unfit. It’s actually easier to break a team down within two phases than it is 10. Because after 10 they’re going to be even more structured, even more forwards are going to get into spaces they feel safe.”
Read that last clause again, because it is the mechanism. Phase count does not disorganise South Africa. It organises them. Every extra ruck gives a forward another two seconds to find the channel he is comfortable defending, and by phase eight the defensive line is not tired, it is sorted.
The tries at Ellis Park prove the point rather than the theory. A charge-down. A rehearsed strike move. Platforms off set piece and turnover. Not one of them arrived at the end of a long phase count, and all five are logged in the five moments that won a Test the All Blacks were losing.
Smith is blunt about where the tries actually come from.
“We’re going to find and do our homework and find these chances to go at people in bad spots, props, the wrong defenders, and score tries like we did last night. Our strike ability last night was brilliant.”
Props. The wrong defenders. Bad spots. That is a shopping list, not a philosophy.
The move that failed in minute one and worked in minute 25
The best single detail in the forty minutes is one Smith throws away.
New Zealand ran a switch off the first lineout of the match. It went nowhere. South Africa were fresh, they were not overchasing, and the runner did not hit the channel he needed.
“But we do it 25 minutes later and we get two loosies to fold. Then you’ve got Grant on three guys and he’s going, what am I doing?”
Same move. Same shape. Twenty-five minutes of difference, and this time two Springbok loose forwards folded in the wrong direction and Grant Williams was left facing three men with no good answer.
A failed strike play is not a failed strike play. It is a deposit. The defence has seen it once and filed it, and the small correction they make afterwards is what you are actually attacking the second time. Almost nobody watching at home counts the gap between the two.
Read also: why the scrum remains South Africa’s key Test advantage, because the platform half of this argument has not gone anywhere.
You cannot go at them from everywhere, and pretending otherwise gets you beaten
The third instruction is the least glamorous and the one most sides ignore.
“You couldn’t attack off every line. There were positions that they felt their back field was comfy. You couldn’t really kick around the 40 m line. In the attacking zone that’s a pretty good spot for a team. But then get deeper, they might be deeper with their back field, so you can attack wider and try and bend them.”
Field position decides whether the play is on at all. Not the call sheet, not the shape, not what worked last week. Where the ball is, and where their back three have chosen to stand because of it.
The tell is available to anyone with a television. Look at the Springbok back three at each opposition lineout. Deep means the kick is dead and the attack goes wide. Up means the space is behind and the boot is the better option. Smith spent eleven years reading that picture in about a second and a half, and the reason his teams looked decisive is that the decision had already been made before the ball came back.
The one passage where all of this failed
None of it worked when South Africa had thirteen men on the field.
Marco van Staden and Cobus Reinach were both yellow-carded inside a minute in the final quarter. Two men down, an edge they could not cover, and the sensible thing would have been to sit in and survive. They did the opposite.
“The funniest thing is, their attack when they went down to 13, when they went very direct and quite narrow, they were getting quite good inroads. Even though you’ve got guys out on the edge, they only had 13, and they were just hammering through channel one and two. It was like we couldn’t really stop it consistently. So there might be a bit of something there.”
There might be a bit of something there. That is Aaron Smith, in a New Zealand studio, telling South Africa where their attack is.
Tony Brown has the footage. He also has a fly-half in Handré Pollard who has never needed width to hurt anyone, and a returning captain in Siya Kolisi. The narrow, direct, two-men-short version of the Springbok attack was the best version on show at Ellis Park, and it only appeared because the alternative had been taken away.
So: what happens in Cape Town? Call it before kick-off
Two honest readings, and both are defensible.
The first says South Africa spent Ellis Park chasing something they are not. Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu rushing at a miracle hole, wide plays that never came off, and ten visits to the New Zealand 22 that produced a single try. That count comes from Bryn Hall, who won three Super Rugby titles at halfback with the Crusaders and hosts the show; he had New Zealand at nine 22 entries for their five tries. Smith’s word for the Springbok version of it was “searching”. Teams that search do not usually stop searching in seven days.
The second says the only period they looked like themselves was the period they had thirteen men and no choice, that Pollard is back to make the first half boring on purpose, and that a sold-out DHL Stadium is a different building to a Highveld crowd watching a lead evaporate.
Lock a score in. Then keep reading, because the four words that decide which of those two happens are directly underneath, and they are not what most of the New Zealand coverage has spent the week saying.
Win the momentum. Stop their momentum. Squeeze them. They kick.
That is it. That is the whole method, and it is the only answer to how to beat the Springboks that has ever survived contact with them.
“That was always the game: win the momentum, stop their momentum, and then squeeze them, and then they’ll kick it. If you can squeeze them the first three phases they’ll generally kick it, and they did last night.”
Three phases. Not ten, not a turnover, not a jackal. Squeeze the first three phases of a Springbok possession and the ball comes back to you off a boot, which means South Africa have handed over possession without scoring and without you having to make a single spectacular play to earn it.
The objective was never the break. The objective was the exit kick.
And once that is the target, the rest of the blueprint stops looking like four separate ideas and starts looking like one. Survive the opening quarter, because in the opening quarter you cannot squeeze anybody. Go in two phases rather than ten, because ten phases is you attacking a set defence instead of them kicking. Pick your field position, because the squeeze only pays where their back three are not already waiting for the ball.
Smith even names the physical price of it, and he does not pretend it is comfortable.
“Those spirited performances that I’ve been a part of in the past, of one guy low, one guy high. You’ve got to want to stop them, and again and again and again. And sometimes you’re actually just not going to get it right. It’s called physics.”
Two defenders per carry, one at the legs and one on the ball, repeated until the third phase. It is not clever. It is a decision to keep doing the least enjoyable thing on a rugby field for as long as it takes, and Ellis Park suggests it takes about three carries.
The warning New Zealand has spent the week ignoring
There is a version of this week’s coverage that has the All Blacks running South Africa off the park in Cape Town. Sea level, tired legs, a wounded champion, a fast start.
Smith wants no part of it.
“So I don’t want the public to think, oh, we should just run over. It’s not going to happen.”
He is arguing against his own supporters, which is the surest sign a pundit believes something. Every fashionable theory about how to beat the Springboks runs through tempo, and tempo is the one thing they are built to absorb. His reasoning is the same reasoning that runs through everything above. South Africa are not beaten by tempo, because tempo hands them phase counts and phase counts are where they are most comfortable. They are beaten by a side that is content to make them kick forty times and take the four or five moments that come out of it.
Nobody ran over anybody at Ellis Park. New Zealand took the handful of moments they were given and spent the rest of the night tackling.
Read next: John Smit watched Ellis Park from the stand and thinks the Springboks have run out of questions, which is the argument for why one week is nowhere near enough time to fix this.
Your turn
You have called a score above. Now call the number that actually decides it.
Every time South Africa win the ball inside their own half on Saturday, count the phases before they kick. Smith says three. If it is consistently four, five, six, then the squeeze is not on and New Zealand are in trouble whatever the scoreboard says at the time. If it is three, the second Test is going the way the first one did and everything on this page holds.
That single number is the difference between a plan and a hope. Post your count. The full fixture list, including every kick-off time in Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry, is here for the two Tests after it.
How to beat the Springboks: your questions
What is the Springboks’ biggest weakness?
Time. Their rush defence is at its most dangerous for the first 10 to 15 minutes and, in Aaron Smith’s words, “it does lessen” after that. Sides that survive the opening quarter are not defending the same picture at minute 50.
Do you beat South Africa with more ball in play?
The evidence says no. Long phase counts allow Springbok forwards to reorganise into the channels they are most comfortable defending. Smith’s view is that it is easier to break them down inside two phases than ten, and all five All Blacks tries at Ellis Park came from set-piece, turnover or rehearsed strike platforms rather than long sequences.
How many phases before the Springboks kick?
Roughly three, if the defensive squeeze is working. Smith’s method is to win the collision, stop their momentum and hold them for three phases, at which point the exit kick usually comes. It is a measurable thing to watch for during a match.
Why is the Springbok defence so hard to attack?
Two reasons that compound. The line has more width in its general structure than most Test defences, so there is rarely an unguarded edge, and the tackle is built around a two-man contact of one low and one high, which slows the ball to between one and one and a half seconds. Attacking sides never get the quick ruck that makes their shape work.
Aaron Smith was speaking on the Aotearoa Rugby Pod with Ross Karl, James Parsons and Bryn Hall, recorded on Sunday 23 August. Match detail from the All Blacks official match report.
