Pieter-Steph du Toit wins his 100th Springbok cap on Saturday without the armband, because Rassie Erasmus gave it back to a flanker who has not finished a Test since early August. Trevor Nyakane, 68 caps and two World Cups, explained the thinking on For The Love Of Rugby: South Africa on Wednesday, and it comes down to ruck speed.
Pieter-Steph du Toit wins his 100th Springbok cap on Saturday without the armband.
Rassie Erasmus took it off him on Tuesday and gave it back to a 35-year-old flanker who has not played since he limped out of the Argentina Test after twenty-five minutes with a grade two hamstring tear. On the numbers it is hard to defend. On Trevor Nyakane’s reading it is the easiest call of the week.
Nyakane, 68 Springbok caps and two World Cup medals, spent Wednesday morning describing a Siya Kolisi leadership style with no speeches in it at all. What it has instead is ruck speed.
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In a hurry? The call is South Africa 27-24. The full reasoning for the Cape Town call sits here, with the two battles that settle it and the variable nobody in New Zealand wants to raise. The rest of this page is about the man who makes that scoreline possible, and about the twelve seconds after a tackle where he does his actual job.
Erasmus took the armband off a man in his 100th Test to give it to one who could not train
The sequence matters, because it tells you how badly South Africa wanted this.
When the side for DHL Stadium was first announced on Monday, Du Toit was captain and Kolisi was bracketed with Paul de Villiers at blindside, still working his way back. Erasmus handed the captaincy back for Cape Town on Tuesday, once Kolisi came through the last of his running. Du Toit was released from the job on his hundredth appearance.
Erasmus was blunt about why. “You probably don’t want to have captaincy and a lot of other things around you,” he said. “You really want to play well.”
That is a defensible reason to move the armband. It is not a reason to move it to a 35-year-old four weeks off a grade two tear, in a Test South Africa must win to keep the series alive, in front of a Cape Town crowd that will turn on anything slow. Erasmus did it anyway. So did his selectors, in a side reported as the most experienced XV South Africa has ever named at 1,012 caps, with Ox Nché reaching fifty on the same afternoon.
There is a reason, and Nyakane gave it away without meaning to.
The Siya Kolisi leadership style has no speeches in it
Nyakane was asked what Kolisi brings back to a side that lost 33-16 at Ellis Park, five tries to one, after leading 16-12 early in the second half. He did not go near the changing room.
“He’s not going to be out there shouting, barking orders you’ve got to follow, cuz he’s going to set the standard… when he’s at his best there’s no other way but to follow. He sets a great example by what he does, and I think that becomes infectious in a side.”
— Trevor Nyakane, 68 Springbok Test caps and a World Cup winner twice over, speaking on For The Love Of Rugby: South Africa on Wednesday 26 August
Read that again with a sceptical eye and it looks like the softest thing a former teammate can say about a friend. Leads by example. Sets the standard. Every captain in world rugby has had that written about him.
Except Nyakane immediately made it specific, and specific is where it stops being a compliment and starts being a job description.
“Siya is a man who leads by the way he plays,” he said. And the way he plays, on Nyakane’s account, is a clean-out.
That is the part worth sitting with. Ask most people to describe a captain’s contribution and you get a list of intangibles. Ask a prop who packed down behind Kolisi for a decade and you get a body position.
The nines never got a clean ball at Ellis Park
Steven Kitshoff, 83 Test caps and Kolisi’s teammate at Western Province, the Stormers and the Springboks, was on the same show and went at it from the other end.
“It wasn’t on a clean plate for Grant [Williams] or for [Cobus Reinach]. So for me, Siya’s job would be to hunt the wide breakdowns, go after them, make sure that they clean the breakdown properly.”
— Steven Kitshoff, 83 Springbok Test caps, retired on medical advice after a neck injury
This is the whole argument in one sentence, and it is checkable against the tape. South Africa built pressure at Ellis Park and could not convert it. The 22 entries were there. The finish was not. Kitshoff’s read is that the ball arriving at the base was scrappy, half a second late, wobbling, and that a scrum-half receiving that ball has already lost the phase before he has touched it.
Nyakane put the consequence the other way round.
“Once they start getting quick ball, they become very deadly… And like you say, to clear those breakdowns and make sure that our nines get clean, quick ball is also going to be very vital.”
Quick ball is not a mood. It is a measurable thing, and the Springboks are a different team above and below the threshold. Give Handré Pollard a ball that arrives flat and on time and he has three options. Give him one that arrives at his ankles with a flanker’s hand in it and he has one, and everyone in the stadium knows what it is.
Read also: why the Springbok scrum is still the platform everything else runs off, and what happens to the rest of the game plan when it goes.
The man he replaced won 19 turnovers in a season
Here is the complication, and it is a real one.
Paul de Villiers is 23. He arrived in Springbok camp having won 19 turnovers for the Stormers across a URC season, jackaled a turnover inside the first minute of his Test debut against England, and kept the No 6 jersey for the Scotland Test in Pretoria. Bakkies Botha and Kwagga Smith have both compared him to Heinrich Brüssow. On any breakdown statistic that gets published, De Villiers is the better player right now, and it is not close.
So Erasmus has dropped the form jackal for a man four weeks off a hamstring tear, and two of the props who played in front of Kolisi for a decade were asked to explain what he actually does.
Neither of them said the word turnover.
Kitshoff went further and named the misreading directly. Kolisi gets rated against De Villiers, he said, because De Villiers brings the poaching. “But what Siya does is donkey work. He gets stuck in… he makes sure that the big poaching threats are taken care of, and taken care of quite quickly.”
Taken care of. Not beaten to the ball. Removed from it.
Watch the second ruck, not the first
This is where the two halves of Nyakane’s answer turn out to be the same sentence.
A jackal wins you the ball. A clean-out wins you the next four phases, and it does it by making the other team spend players. Nyakane laid the chain out in full: Kolisi arrives late and hard on a defender who has slowed the ball, the attacking side sees a body over its possession and sends an extra forward or two to secure the following ruck, and those forwards come out of the attacking line. Two phases later the line is short. That is when a winger gets a one-on-one he had not earned.
“Most people don’t see,” Nyakane said. “You always see the guys that are scoring the tries, but you don’t ask yourself how did that space open up.”
So here is the tell, and it costs nothing to use on Saturday.
When Kolisi hits a ruck, do not follow the ball. Stay where you are and count the bodies the All Blacks commit to the next breakdown. Then count how many are standing in the defensive line when the ball finally goes wide. If the first number is up and the second is down, that is the captaincy working, and it will not appear anywhere in the post-match graphics.
That is the answer to the question at the top of this page. The Siya Kolisi leadership style is not a set of words, and it is not a gift for speeches. It is a standard set physically, roughly forty times an afternoon, in the twelve seconds after a tackle that television directors cut away from. A team copies what it watches. It does not copy what it is told.
Cape Town is where the theory gets tested
None of which makes it the right call.
Kolisi is 35, on a repaired hamstring, in a fixture that will be played on a wetter and slicker surface than Ellis Park, against a New Zealand side that scored seven tries against the Lions on Tuesday and came from 18 points down to do it. Forty hard clean-outs is a young man’s shift. If the hamstring holds for sixty minutes the argument above is sound. If it goes at thirty, Erasmus has burned a bench slot, a captain and the form No 6 in one selection, and the ratings from Ellis Park will look generous by comparison.
WeTalkRugby’s position is that Erasmus has read it correctly, for an unfashionable reason. South Africa did not lose the first Test because they lacked leadership. They lost it because their nines were playing off dirty ball for forty minutes and their fly-half never got to make a decision with time on it. Kolisi is being picked as a fix for that, not as a mascot.
This is the second of four Tests in every fixture and kick-off time in Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry. Lose it and the best available outcome for South Africa is a drawn tour.
Read next: what the Springbok camp actually does on the Monday after a defeat — Kitshoff on why nobody shouts on Saturday night, which is the same argument as this one seen from inside the building.
Frequently asked
Why is Siya Kolisi captain instead of Pieter-Steph du Toit in his 100th Test?
Rassie Erasmus moved the armband back to Kolisi on Tuesday 25 August once he was passed fit. Erasmus said he did not want Du Toit carrying the captaincy alongside everything else attached to a hundredth cap: “You really want to play well.”
What is the Siya Kolisi leadership style?
On Trevor Nyakane’s account, it is entirely non-verbal. Kolisi does not issue instructions during a match. He sets a physical standard at the breakdown and the team copies it, which Nyakane calls “infectious”.
Who is Paul de Villiers and why did he lose the No 6 jersey?
De Villiers is a 23-year-old Stormers flanker who won 19 turnovers in a URC season and took a jackal turnover in the first minute of his Test debut against England. He kept the shirt for the Scotland Test and lost it to Kolisi’s return, not to any drop in form.
When is South Africa v New Zealand in Cape Town?
Saturday 29 August at DHL Stadium, kick-off 17:10 local time, the second of four Tests.
Your turn
Two ways to read this selection. Either Erasmus has correctly identified that the Springboks lost at Ellis Park because their ruck ball was slow, and has picked the best clean-out forward in the country to fix it. Or he has dropped the form jackal in South Africa for a 35-year-old captain on a repaired hamstring because the armband matters more to him than the breakdown statistics do.
One of those is a plan. Which one is it?
