Three days to go until the Springboks and the All Blacks meet at Ellis Park for the 111th time. Rather than wait, we have gone back through the 110 Tests before it and picked out 23 of the best All Blacks vs Springboks tries ever scored: the length-of-the-field counter-attacks, the finishes off nothing, the ones people still argue about in pubs in Johannesburg and Auckland.
There is no ranking and no order of merit here. It is 23 tries we keep going back to, spread across amateur tours, isolation, the 1996 series and the professional era that followed.
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The rivalry in numbers
South Africa and New Zealand have played 110 Tests since 1921. The All Blacks have won 63, the Springboks 43, and four have finished level, which leaves New Zealand on a 57 per cent record.
That 57 per cent is the All Blacks’ own count, and against every other side they have ever played the figure is higher. No team has lived with them like this one.
Springboks v All Blacks 2026: the fixtures
This is a four-Test series, which has not happened between these two in the professional era, and the first full All Blacks tour of South Africa since 1996. The Tests run across four weekends, and the last of them is not in South Africa at all.
The four Tests, with kick-off times in South Africa and the United Kingdom:
| Test | Date | Venue | Kick-off (SAST / BST) |
|---|---|---|---|
| First Test | Sat 22 Aug | Ellis Park, Johannesburg | 17:10 / 16:10 |
| Second Test | Sat 29 Aug | Cape Town Stadium | 17:10 / 16:10 |
| Third Test | Sat 5 Sep | FNB Stadium, Johannesburg | 17:10 / 16:10 |
| Fourth Test | Sat 12 Sep | M&T Bank Stadium, Baltimore | 23:00 / 22:00 |
New Zealand arrived early and played three of the South African franchises before the Test series began. They beat the Stormers 38-21 in Cape Town, the Sharks 54-0 in Durban and the Bulls 50-19 at Loftus Versfeld: 142 points scored, 40 conceded. They face the Lions at Ellis Park on Tuesday 25 August, in the gap between the first and second Tests.
If you want the build-up rather than the highlights, we have a tour hub updated after every match, the predicted Springbok XV for Saturday and what the three tour thrashings really tell us.
Why the best All Blacks vs Springboks tries look the way they do
The cliché about this fixture is that it is a forward-dominated arm-wrestle in which nothing survives out wide. The tries say otherwise, and the reason is that both sides are built to punish territory mistakes, but in opposite directions. New Zealand’s instinct from deep is to run. South Africa’s is to kick, chase and squeeze until a defence cracks. Put those two habits in the same match and you tend to get either a 90-metre counter-attack or a five-metre error, with less in between than two sides this good ought to produce.
There is a second reason, less often mentioned. These teams meet rarely, and neither has ever properly solved the other, so the games are played at an intensity that generates mistakes as readily as brilliance. Most of the tries in the compilation come out of one or the other.
Tell us what we missed
We picked these All Blacks vs Springboks tries ourselves, which means we have almost certainly left out one you would have opened with. A rivalry this old does not fit in one video, and some of the best of it sits in grainy footage that barely survived.
So tell us. Drop the try, the year and the scorer in the comments below. We read every one.
