Round two of The Reluctant Championship continues in Perth on Saturday.
Three of the four teams insist on reserving all their rivalry energy for one team: the All Blacks, who seem to be having an internal banter session at the moment.
Australia is fixated on bringing the Bledisloe back, the Springboks have shown their hand with old school New Zealand tours back and forth being planned, and Argentina have already declared 2024 a success, no matter what happens next.
In the Six Nations, which rides rivalries to the hilt to easily hold the title of most compelling annual Test tournament in the world, if Ireland wins round one in England and then goes up to Murrayfield, no rotation of victorious gladiators will occur because Andy Farrell knows ‘what we do in life echoes in eternity.’
Simply put, every chance to Grand Slam must not be wasted. A new song will be composed for each player for each pub he will own one day about that day.
With the best chance to run the tables in ages, after the record-setting Brisbane bash, the Springbok selectors have named a starting XV with only 331 caps.
A quarter of those caps are worn by Pieter-Steph du Toit who probably makes 331 tackles in a season. The 5-3 Bok bench has 87 more caps than the 15 starters.
(Photo by Morgan Hancock/Getty Images)
To put that in context, the Boks boasted 990 starting caps in Durban against the Irish. The spice between those two teams suffused the rugby world for a month not just with fury but with sound, soundbites, gambits, revenge, and passion.
If either of Farrell or Rassie Erasmus had picked anything clearly less than ‘best available’ their fanbases would have run for the pitchforks and stormed castles.
Even the experimental side in Bloemfontein in 2022 which ended up surrendering a century of clean sheets to Wales had more (392) than will run on in Perth.
Kiwi rugby historians tell me their team never did this, adjusting for cap inflation in the modern era, even in ‘dead rubbers.’ This sounds true, because the Bledisloe is a craven cup, with both the holder and the grasper desperate in any era.
As has been well-documented on these pages, the Wallaby-Bok competition over the decades is one of top tier rugby’s closest and thus worthy of rival status.
The ledger after almost a hundred Tests is 51-40 for South Africa with three draws and only a 2.47 point per match advantage to the Boks. In other words, a Quade Cooper or Kurtley Beale or James O’Connor penalty goes over and the Wallabies win.
But from the time the two nations began to play each other in 1933 in Cape Town, through the time Australia first won at Newlands in 1953 and Wallaby captain John Solomon was carried off the pitch on Capetonian shoulders to have friendly beers through today, as we struggle to develop proper banter across the Ironic Ocean gap, there is fizzle instead of fury.
The only match which seemed to generate real ire by South Africans was in 2011 when David Pocock showed how a wild dog can survive shotgun blasts, but most of the animosity ran towards, wait for it, a Kiwi. A recent candidate was in Adelaide where I boiled in the sun and saw a brutal assault on a mustache.
For Aussies, the Rassie Erasmus videos may have been the most enlivening chapter of late.
But ask around and see who knows the Mandela Challenge Plate is up for grabs. (Australia has won the Plate 13 times since 2000).
An Aussie series versus England is twice as spicy yet the Wallabies have lost to South Africa about twice as much.
Typically, the Wallabies lose in South Africa and win at home. The 33-7 thumping was not a total shock given the current state of rugby fortunes, but it did equal the largest winning margin away for the Boks in the series. In particular, the first half was perhaps the worst of any Test played in Brisbane by the Wallabies.
Revenge or redemption or rectification are common themes in locker rooms.
The contrast between Adelaide and Sydney in 2022 was stark and was animated by Makazole Mapimpi’s anger at being blitzed by Marika Koroibete, a showboating try by usually quiet Damien de Allende, Eben Etzebeth’s wild-eyed grapple of Allan Alaalatoa, and the constant jeering of the mustache.
I was in the sun at the oval in Adelaide and in the rain at the Allianz and my overarching feeling was how curious my neighbours were about my insane emotion and noise. I felt as if I was a rare creature in a zoo.
The Wallabies react following their Bledisloe Cup loss at the MCG in 2023. (Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
It was so good to see a hiding after the week before. I lost my cool.
This drama required the losing coach to keep faith with his players. Yes, Willie le Roux came back in with great effect, but for the most part, even the drama around who wins the Championship itself is muted in comparison to the Six Nations, the Boks who had a point to prove from the week before were able to prove that point.
The loser did not drop ten players. Joe Schmidt will likely want to make changes, but he will always be tempted to give young forwards a chance at old school revenge (a Bok term) or a more acceptably phrased ‘redemption.’
But what of the winner? Why would the equivalent of a Grand Slam be risked with wholesale changes? Neither would South Africa in a knockout match at a World Cup or a second Test versus Ireland. But here we are.
Jan-Hendrik Wessels, Johan Grobbelaar and Thomas du Toit are no mugs in the scrum but naming them instead of the first or second rated front rows takes a bit out of that set piece revenge saga, whilst locks Ruan Nortje and Salmaan Nortje will not electrify the Perth crowd quite as much as an RG Snyman or Etzebeth in the lineout contest.
The good news for fans is in the backline, where the Mapimpi-Koroibete rematch may be the curtain raiser for UFC 305 in Perth in which the darling of South African fight fans, middleweight champion Dricus du Plessis, will be led into the ring on Sunday by Etzebeth and Siya Kolisi in his title defence against, you guessed it, a Kiwi.
But the point is the battle of the backlines and benches will be box office.
Slick centre Lukhanyo Am slots into the Bok number 12 jersey to give crashballer de Allende much-needed rest, and his combination with phenom Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu and red hot Jesse Kriel is worth the ticket.
Aphelele Fassi scored the URC try of the year and Cheslin Kolbe played four positions at Suncorp.
This may be the strongest bench in rugby history, with Malcolm Marx, Ox Nche, Vincent Koch, Etzebeth, Handre Pollard and three other World Cup winners.
Is it a sign of disrespect?
No, not towards Joe Schmidt and the Wallabies.
Wallabies coach Joe Schmidt. (Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)
The Boks have two 1000-cap lineups set but need a third string found and sorted and capped and combined for 2027 on these very shores. This requires a few Tests in 2024 to be about unearthing talent.
Ben-Jason Dixon is an example of a find; only a groin injury keeps him out here, but he will play against the All Blacks. He was not seen a marquee player before Brisbane. Might we see Grobbelaar or Fassie in a new light on Sunday morning?
There are only three remaining Tests in which to put a young hooker or fullback under the gun in a way only a real Test match can, against a wounded and fired up home team like the Wallabies: this one, the Scotland Test later this year, and the closer against Wales.
Erasmus cannot use many rookies in Tucuman, Argentina. The Bok-Pumas match in Nelspruit will be for all the marbles. The All Black Tests in South Africa will be even more pressure than the Irish contests and home crowds can be harder to handle for a young player. Perth poses the perfect solution, as long as the Mother of All Bomb Squads is ready to bail any struggler out.
This is not disrespect of Australia. It is, however, a sign of how far down The Rugby Championship itself sits on the Bok radar. Individual matchups, as with the All Blacks or Ireland and England, and the overarching World Cup, dwarf it.
SANZAAR does not remedy the issue with tepid marketing which pale in comparison to social media’s best content creators. But an underlying and organic problem is the awkwardness of the Saffa-Aussie ribaldry. Australians are a fair bit more ironic and self-effacing than South Africans, who tend to have to bash comedy doors down to thrive in a far more direct and brutal banter ecosphere.
One could argue there is a bit too much respect and not enough smack talk.
Schmidt is a bit under the gun here, in that Erasmus has built an alibi for loss but will no doubt swagger out of Australia with the Full Rassie if his novel team wins.
Harry Joneshttps://https://ift.tt/vxXzJnT much respect, not enough smack talk: Wallabies vs Boks has big issues – Rassie’s selection is only one of them
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