John Smit, the captain who lifted the World Cup in 2007, went on New Zealand’s The Good, The Bad & The Rugby the morning after the first Test and described the end of something. REVIEW: Wednesday 26 August.
South Africa won the scrum. They won the collisions, they won the territory, and for forty minutes they won the Test match. They dominated Ellis Park and lost by seventeen points, and John Smit had worked out why before he got out of the stadium.
He also described the fourteen points that decided it, and got one detail wrong in a way that makes Saturday harder for South Africa rather than easier. That part comes later.
Smit was in the stand on Saturday, watching the side he captained 83 times get beaten five tries to one by a team that spent most of the night defending. He spoke the next morning on The Good, The Bad & The Rugby: Australia & New Zealand, opposite Justin Marshall, in Johannesburg on tour, and Kieran Read, 127 Tests and a World Cup winner twice over, up at 3am in Christchurch to watch with his son.
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He was not asked for a verdict on six years of Springbok rugby. He gave one anyway.
“We’ve been on the other side for a long time. We’ve sort of provided questions that people couldn’t answer. And yesterday… there was answers everywhere.”
Why springboks Lost The half-time every South African recognised
Smit watched the first forty and felt what the whole country felt.
“It felt like we had the upper hand. It felt like we had the momentum at half-time. The scrum performed better than I thought. I mean, I know that they’ve been good in the past, but I thought that the All Blacks would give them a bigger challenge at scrum time.”
South Africa led 13-12. They had been inside the New Zealand 22 repeatedly and come out with almost nothing. John Smit won 111 caps as a hooker, and he said the quiet part immediately.
“The scoreboard doesn’t really reflect that either, which is never a good thing against the ABs. I just thought they had an answer for all of that. They absorbed so much, and we didn’t convert enough points if you look at the time spent in the 22 versus what we got out of it. And that always worries me against the All Blacks.”
Dave Rennie put a number on it afterwards. South Africa went into the Test averaging five and a half points per entry into the opposition 22, the best rate in world rugby. On Saturday they managed 0.9. New Zealand managed 3.7, and all 33 of their points came from inside that 22.
That is not a team being out-played. That is a team arriving in the right place over and over and coming away with a single converted try. The mechanics are in the breakdown of how the All Blacks lost the first hour at Ellis Park and won the Test anyway.
Six years of being wrong about Rassie, and one prediction that landed
John Smit was asked the obvious question. What does Erasmus do now?
“This is a hard question. I mean, we were trying to figure out what Rassie’s going to do next for six years, and I’ve been wrong for six years.”
Then he did it anyway, and he got it right.
“That 23 that he picked, when I saw it I was like, wow, that’s probably the best 23 he could have picked. And then obviously watching the game you think to yourself, there was probably a couple of boys that maybe looked a little rusty… I don’t know about selection. He could probably change a few things. But I’m just not sure he will.”
On Monday, Erasmus changed four. Handré Pollard came in at 10 for Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, Cobus Reinach at 9 for Grant Williams, Ethan Hooker for the injured Cheslin Kolbe, and Siya Kolisi was bracketed with Paul de Villiers at blindside. Ox Nché, Malcolm Marx, Wilco Louw, Eben Etzebeth, Ruan Nortje and Jasper Wiese keep their shirts. Pieter-Steph du Toit captains in his 100th Test; Nché plays his 50th. It is a team of 1,012 caps and four changes for Cape Town, which is a long way from panic.
John Smit, wrong about Erasmus for six years by his own count, called the one that mattered. A coach who has worked his way out of a British and Irish Lions series defeat and a World Cup pool loss does not reach for the wrecking ball on a Monday.
Read also: Jasper Wiese was marked a nine in defeat — which tells you how strange this loss was.
The word Erasmus refused, and the word Smit used anyway
Asked what he would be saying to the squad this week, John Smit went straight to the national reflex rather than the tactics.
“This team in South Africa will be depressed into all hell this morning, and it’ll be, you know, the world has come to an end, and what is happening… People go from zero to catastrophe in South Africa when the Boks lose quite easily.”
Two days after that, in his own press conference, Erasmus refused the word catastrophe and named the scrum he blamed — the 58th-minute penalty conceded on South Africa’s own feed at 19-16, at the end of a sequence in which his pack had won three scrum penalties in a row. His line was that his forwards dominated the set piece and that it counted for nothing while New Zealand were better everywhere else.
Same week, same word, opposite directions. John Smit used “catastrophe” for what his country does. Erasmus used it for what he refuses to do. The gap between those positions is where South Africa’s next fortnight lives.
“He hasn’t been found out for quite some time”
This is the line that will travel, and it should.
“You just never know with Rassie. He could make 10 changes… I’d love to be able to know what goes on in that head. But he’s definitely hurting. You know, he hasn’t been found out for quite some time. So this will be a difficult Sunday for the coach.”
Read it twice. John Smit is not saying Erasmus was outwitted. He is saying something narrower. The Springbok method, the thing that has made them almost unbeatable for six years, was answered in real time by a coaching group that had studied it and players who held the counter for eighty minutes at altitude.
The evidence supports him. The bomb squad misfired. New Zealand went wide early and repeatedly, which is not what teams are supposed to do against a blitz, and Smit noticed exactly that.
“The All Blacks went — like, I haven’t seen that for a long time. They purposefully went wide early a lot, and so kept on putting pressure on that outside channel. And then the difficulty is when you lose Jesse Kriel to that 13 channel and you don’t have that guy that’s doing the shuttles up and down on the press defence, it gets harder and harder.”
Then the sentence no Springbok supporter wants from a World Cup-winning captain.
“That’s the highest error rate I’ve ever seen from this team for a long time… that’s the most sort of unforced errors I’ve seen for a long time from the South African side.”
The speech John Smit would give, and the thing he gets slightly wrong
Smit was asked what he would say in the changing room this week if he still had the armband. It was the most useful ninety seconds of the show.
“If it was me, I’d be the captain saying, ‘Guys, we were in control of this Test for the first 40.’ You know, Malcolm loses a ball over the line, and the next thing he gets charged down, and it’s a 14-point swing, and just like that you go from having momentum to getting a spanking. So I would definitely be trying to bring in some calm and saying, let’s not panic.”
This is the detail he gets wrong, and it is the one flagged at the top. The instinct is right. The compression is not. Those two moments sat thirteen minutes apart, not back to back. Jordie Barrett came off his wing at a lineout in the 35th minute and dislodged the ball from Marx over the line. Fabian Holland charged down Grant Williams’s box kick in the 48th and scored his first Test try from the bounce. Fourteen points, yes. But two separate acts of effort by two different New Zealanders in two different phases, which is a harder thing for a captain to explain away than one bad minute.
That is the version South Africa has to sit with. Not a collapse. Two moments of work by opponents who got there first, on a night the Springboks could not turn field position into points.
He closed his own argument better than anyone else has.
“We haven’t become a bad team in one day. We actually have the ability to bounce back and give this series a proper go.”
Where this leaves the series
The arithmetic is brutal. New Zealand lead 1-0 in a four-Test series, so South Africa must now win all three remaining Tests to win it. Two wins squares it at 2-2 and settles nothing.
Marshall, in the 1996 squad that won the first series in South Africa, put it with less diplomacy.
“We have got such a massive foot in the door. We’re not just got it slightly ajar. We’ve taken a great big stride and stuck our foot all the way in their house and said, ‘Okay, now you’ve got the pressure.'”
Read, sitting beside him, would not sign it.
“Even if we won the next Test I still wouldn’t feel confident that we’re going to win the next two, just because that battle was so close to being — as John was saying, there was the 14-point swing that could have gone either way.”
Take Read’s side. A Springbok team that dominated the set piece and the territory and still lost by seventeen has one repair job, not five. Pollard at 10 is a different proposition from a rusty Feinberg-Mngomezulu, and Reinach is quicker to the base than Williams.
John Smit’s judgement is the one to keep. The questions have stopped working. That is not the same as the team being finished, and there is a version of Saturday where four changes make the old method unanswerable again for eighty minutes.
Frequently asked
What did John Smit say about the Springboks after Ellis Park?
That South Africa had spent years “providing questions that people couldn’t answer” and that on Saturday “there was answers everywhere”. He also said Rassie Erasmus “hasn’t been found out for quite some time”.
Did Rassie Erasmus change the Springboks team for the second Test?
Four changes. Handré Pollard for Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu at fly-half, Cobus Reinach for Grant Williams at scrum-half, Ethan Hooker for the injured Cheslin Kolbe on the wing, and Siya Kolisi bracketed with Paul de Villiers at blindside. The entire front row and second row are unchanged.
Why did the Springboks lose at Ellis Park?
They could not convert field position. South Africa averaged 0.9 points per entry into the New Zealand 22 against a season rate of five and a half, while every one of New Zealand’s 33 points came from a try or the conversion of one. Two yellow cards inside a minute finished it.
How many Tests do South Africa need to win the series?
All three. New Zealand lead 1-0 in a four-Test series, so two more South African wins would only draw it 2-2.
When is the second Test?
Saturday 29 August, DHL Stadium, Cape Town, 5.10pm local. Every fixture and kick-off time in Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry is here.
Read next: why Erasmus says the selection is on him, and what that admission tells you about the mood in the camp.
Your turn
Two readings, and they cannot both be right. Either John Smit is correct and the Springbok method has been solved by a group that finally did the homework, in which case four changes will not fix it in six days. Or Ellis Park was one bad night of hands and two moments of New Zealand effort, in which case Pollard walks out at DHL Stadium and the questions start working again.
John Smit has been wrong about Rassie Erasmus for six years and says so himself. Pick a side in the comments, and pick it before kick-off on Saturday so it counts.
John Smit, Justin Marshall and Kieran Read were speaking on The Good, The Bad & The Rugby: Australia & New Zealand, published on Sunday 23 August. Match detail from the official All Blacks report.
