Asked in Johannesburg on Monday what two Tests against the Springboks take out of a player, Jordie Barrett answered honestly. A few hours earlier, Rassie Erasmus had done the same sum with a spreadsheet.
“Like, I’m physically sore.”
Nothing scandalous in that. Every international is sore in week three of a Test series, and Jordie Barrett said it the way a plumber describes a bad back. He then rebuilt the sentence into the answer a professional is supposed to give, about being fresh by Saturday and mentally on the money.
Which would be an unremarkable thing to say, except for what somebody else in Johannesburg had said a few hours before it.
First, the reason the admission matters at all, and it has nothing to do with Barrett. A few hours earlier and a short drive away, Rassie Erasmus was asked about the shape of this series and replied with arithmetic. He has had somebody count the minutes every New Zealand player has spent on a field over the past six weeks, set them against his own squad’s, and concluded that South Africa are roughly an hour lighter.
“So hopefully punch drunk wouldn’t come into this game.”
He said that before Barrett spoke. By lunchtime the opposition’s senior midfielder had confirmed the premise on camera, without being asked to.
Altitude, sea level, altitude, then a flight
Look at what this tour actually asks of a body, in a series where New Zealand scored four tries to three in Cape Town and still lost. Ellis Park sits around 1,700 metres above sea level, where the air gives back less than it takes. Cape Town is at sea level. FNB Stadium on Saturday is back up on the Highveld. Then the squad flies to Baltimore for a fourth Test seven days after that, six time zones west.
Four Test matches in four weekends. Two of them at altitude, one of them across the Atlantic, and eight fixtures on the tour in total once the provincial games are counted.
Jordie Barrett has started both Tests at 12. That is 160 minutes in the same channel as Damian de Allende, and he is expected to start the third.
“You’ve got one crack and you don’t get a whole lot of moments to ice games at this level.”
A diminishing resource, described by the man spending it.
The soreness has an address
It is not the collisions. The things Barrett blamed for losing that Test are the expensive ones.
They chased the game for the opening half-hour. They defended their own goal line long enough for the discipline to start going, which is where the offside penalties and the “bit of stuff around the ruck and maul” come from. And they kept going up into the air.
The aerial contest has decided both Tests, and Jordie Barrett is the man being sent back from midfield to help with it. By his own account the laws leave the receiving side a man short, because anyone near his own catcher has to genuinely compete or clear out, and standing in the landing zone doing neither is a penalty. He called it a lottery. Then he said this:
“Trust me, it’s a lot harder than it probably looks on the telly.”
RugbyPass columnist Ben Smith argues the traffic is self-inflicted and he is not wrong: at Ellis Park, Barrett and Will Jordan went up for the same ball and turned it over with no Springbok anywhere near it. Blame the law or blame the structure, the outcome is identical. A 12 doing a back-three job on top of his own tackle count, in week three, at altitude.
Read also: Ardie Savea named the way New Zealand lost in Cape Town, and his answer was not the scrum.
One camp is counting metres. The other is counting bodies.
Mike Blair, the All Blacks attack coach, explained the New Zealand method. Phil Healy, appointed head of performance in March, tracks running metres in training and in matches, and the coaching box spends the last quarter working out who is still moving well.
Their read on Cape Town was that nobody needed rescuing. At 70 minutes, Blair said, they still had backs sprinting to reconnect the line, so they left them out there and trusted it.
Erasmus has spent 30 players on two Tests and expects to have used 36 by Baltimore, with four men finishing the tour without a run. He is not trusting anybody’s legs. He is budgeting them, four weeks out, and telling the room he has done it.
What to watch after 60 minutes
Tired sides do not miss tackles first. They make late decisions.
Watch New Zealand’s midfield in the third quarter on Saturday, and count the beat between the defender committing and the ball leaving Barrett’s hands. If that gap grows at altitude, Erasmus spent Monday morning proving something. If it does not, his whole four-week plan still rests on the one thing that has not worked for South Africa yet all series.
Your turn
Two ways to hear Monday. Either an honest professional described a normal week-three body and paid a rival a routine compliment, or the man in the middle of New Zealand’s midfield told a room full of microphones that he is hurting and that the other lot are better, and Erasmus now knows where to aim. Every fixture, result and kick-off time in Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry is there to check it against on Saturday night. Which one did you hear?
