'Plant seeds of future belief': How Springboks should approach first ever quarter-final

Ordinarily, after a coach watched his team cop a 57-10 drubbing, he’d wear an expression like thunder and have a few choice words for his players and their performance. Swys de Bruin proved there are exceptions to every rule.

In the immediate aftershock of the Springboks’ pasting at the hands of a fluent French side, de Bruin bounded into the mixed zone with a beaming smile. As is custom, the first question asked by a journalist wanted to know what went wrong. De Bruin took things in a different direction.

“Nothing,” he declared, as if he hadn’t seen the scoreboard. “The question we should be asking is what did France do right. They played very well today. The reality is that they are ranked fourth in the world and that showed.”

Portia Woodman-Wickliffe receives Women’s Top 50 award

New Zealand Women’s superstar Portia Woodman-Wickliffe spoke to RugbyPass after receiving the prestigious, inaugural RugbyPass Women’s Top 50 award this week.

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Portia Woodman-Wickliffe receives Women’s Top 50 award

New Zealand Women’s superstar Portia Woodman-Wickliffe spoke to RugbyPass after receiving the prestigious, inaugural RugbyPass Women’s Top 50 award this week.

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Fair enough. But South Africa are ranked 10th and have qualified for the quarter finals as one of the best eight teams at the World Cup. A week on from beating Italy – their first victory over a top-10 ranked team – one might have expected the parameters to have shifted.

There are, of course, some provisos. South Africa’s ranking, and indeed their passage to the knockouts of the World Cup for the first time in the history, is a sign of their rapid rise. By many estimates they have exceeded expectations and are a few years ahead in their projected development.

It was only two tournaments ago that SA Rugby didn’t deem the women’s programme worthy enough of inclusion at the global showpiece and only three years ago that they lost 75-0 to England in the group stage. Things are moving and they’re moving quickly.

There was also the question of personnel. De Bruin had made 10 changes to the team that beat Italy a week earlier. Fly-half Libbie Janse van Rensburg and lock Danelle Lochner were absent from the match-day 23. The front and back rows were altered. There were changes at full-back, scrum-half and in midfield.

“We could have played our best team and lost by 10 points and learned nothing,” de Bruin said. “What would have been the point in that? We were committed to giving every player in the squad an opportunity to play in the World Cup and we’ve done that. We probably won’t even review this game.”

The skipper for the day, Babalwa Latsha, echoed the feel-good vibe: “It’s quite amazing. Women’s rugby in South Africa has come a long way, and to be in a quarter-final means that the wave is finally reaching its cusp.

“We knew it was going to be a tough outing today, tough up front, and going into the quarter-final we feel that was good preparation for us.”

It would be unfair to counter any of this. After all, women’s rugby in South Africa has been beset by many challenges for decades. They’ve been mismanaged by those in charge. They’ve been ignored by mainstream media and corporate sponsors. Their players have not had the benefit of a robust pyramid below the sharp edge of the national team. Most of them only came to rugby in their late teens.

Latsha is right. This is a seismic moment for South African rugby. We’ve already likened their win over Italy to the four World Cups won by the men’s team. This is a team worth celebrating, even after such a chastening defeat to France.

But something needs to switch eventually. As the team develops and starts the steep climb up World Rugby’s rankings, someone within the group needs to speak like a champion in waiting. Either the coaches or the players need to display a bit of steel and grit and say that anything other than a victory is not good enough.

Talking like a champion is far easier than actually winning titles (just take a scroll through social media to see how cheap talk can be). But that doesn’t mean that an alteration to the narrative, to the internal monologue of the players and coaches, wouldn’t be welcome. This could start with the quarter finals.

To be clear, they have little to no chance of beating New Zealand in Exeter. But that isn’t the point. The point is how they frame themselves before, during, and after the contest. Do they simply mark their presence as achievement enough? Or do they start planting the seeds of future belief, telling themselves that one day, maybe not this week, maybe not even this tournament, but soon, they will belong at the same table as the giants?

The Black Ferns will almost certainly run riot. But the Springboks can still win in defeat if they shift the tone. That begins with language. With mindset. With refusing to celebrate simply making up the numbers. South African rugby fans already know how powerful that mental edge can be. The men’s team built dynasties on defiance. The women’s team has a chance to script its own story.

How they choose to speak about themselves now will go a long way to shaping whether this moment becomes a fleeting cameo or the start of something era-defining. The small wins need to be celebrated. And there has been plenty to celebrate over the past three years.

But if even greater triumphs are to be heralded one day, the rhetoric, and the ambition behind it, will need to evolve.