The All Blacks loosehead who would be packing down opposite Ox Nché in Baltimore spent four minutes on The Good, The Bad & Rugby ANZ explaining him. He never reached for the law book once.
New Zealand knocked the ball on in Soweto. Ox Nché did not want to play on. “We’ll take the scrum, sir,” he told the referee, according to the All Blacks loosehead who would have been marking him.
Tamaiti Williams reached for that moment when he was asked what makes Ox Nché so hard to hold. He never once said the word legal.
Does that make him the best scrummager in the world, or the best-refereed? Settle it in the comments.
Williams’s actual answer had nothing to do with angles, binds or what a referee should be seeing. It had to do with recovery, and there is a reason a front-rower goes there first.
Ox Nché passed 50 Test caps in late August and has run this series. Rassie Erasmus went back to the front row he first picked for Soweto, and South Africa won 29-24 with a penalty try from a scrum among their points.
Ox Nché is dangerous in the half-second after the shape goes
Here is the mechanism, in the words of a man who does the job.
“I reckon he can get into positions and get out of positions better than anyone. He’s so strong where other people could be vulnerable… we always talk about perfect pushing positions and what your knee looks like or your back looks like on the hip, but he is so powerful and strong.”
Sit with the second half of that. Every front-rower is coached towards one shape: knee under hip, back flat, spine long, force travelling in a straight line from the ankle through the shoulder. Coaches call it the perfect pushing position. It is a fiction. No scrum in Test rugby stays in it for more than a fraction of a second, because the man opposite is being paid to destroy it.
The skill lives in the half-second after the shape is gone.
The half-second nobody at home is watching
Most props, in a bad position, are passengers until the scrum resets or somebody gets penalised.
Williams’s read is that Ox Nché is dangerous in exactly the moment when everybody else is surviving, and that he generates force from body positions that would leave another loosehead helpless. Technique will not fix that. Nor will four days.
Read also: why the Springboks scrum remains South Africa’s key Test advantage, which is the long version of what Williams described in two sentences.
The whole pack is built to let him do it
Williams then widened it, and this is the part New Zealand supporters will like least.
“I just think the way the whole scrum functions is it works for them and it works well.”
No complaint. No qualifier. A functioning system, described by the man it has been beating.
He went further and used a phrase that will not go down quietly in New Zealand.
“We got to give him his flowers. He’s a freak.”
Kyle Sinckler watched the same footage and called them legal last week, and Daan Human answered the walking-around charge with six years and a farm before that. What is different here is the source. Sinckler is English and retired. Human coaches South Africa. Williams is the All Black whose jersey is at stake, and he is agreeing with them.
The four words that explain the whole thing
The best detail in the interview is not a technical one. It is something Ox Nché said to a referee.
New Zealand knocked the ball on in Soweto. A knock-on hands the put-in to the other side, and most packs in that situation are happy to take whatever is quickest. Nché wanted the scrum.
“The weekend we knocked the ball on and he didn’t even want to keep playing. He’s like, ‘We’ll take the scrum, sir.'”
Four words to a referee, and they tell you more about this series than any freeze-frame of a bind. A loosehead who would rather pack down than play rugby is a loosehead who believes the scrum is the fastest route to points available to him. On the evidence of the ratings from Soweto, where the front row carried the night, he was right.
Confidence is not a soft factor at a scrum
Williams drew the obvious conclusion, and it is the one New Zealand have spent five weeks avoiding.
“It goes to show his mindset and personally I think that’s a big, big part of scrummaging is your mindset.”
It decides who commits first, who holds a bad position rather than folding out of it, and who is still driving at the eighth engagement of an afternoon. A pack that wants scrums gets more of them, and a pack that dreads them starts hunting for the quick tap.
So back to the word nobody in the front row bothered with. New Zealand have spent this series asking whether the Springboks scrum is legal. The one All Black qualified to complain about it did not raise the question, because from inside the front row it is not the interesting one. The interesting one is whether you want to be there.
Frequently asked
Why is Ox Nché so hard to scrummage against?
According to Tamaiti Williams, because he recovers from bad body positions better than anyone. Most props are neutralised once the ideal pushing shape is lost. Nché keeps generating force from positions that leave other looseheads helpless.
Did Ox Nché really ask the referee for a scrum?
Williams says that after a New Zealand knock-on in the third Test, Nché indicated he did not want to play on and told the referee “we’ll take the scrum, sir”. Williams cited it as evidence of the mindset behind the Springboks scrum rather than as a complaint.
How many caps does Ox Nché have?
He passed 50 Tests for South Africa in late August, and remains the first-choice Springboks loosehead.
Is Tamaiti Williams available for the fourth Test?
No. Williams has not played since round three of Super Rugby Pacific because of a spinal infection, has been cleared to run at pre-season in November, and has no date to play.
Your turn
An All Blacks loosehead has now said, on the record, that Ox Nché is a freak, that the Springboks scrum works, and that mindset is half of it. That is either the most honest assessment anyone in black has given this series, or it is a player being generous about the thing that is beating his team. Pick one, and say which part of Saturday would change your mind.
