The curious case of Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu

If you wanted to explain Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu to someone who had never seen him play, you could do worse than sit them down in front of Saturday’s Test in Turin. Start in the ninth minute. There’s a dummy to make Giacomo Nicotera and Alessandro Fusco hesitate, a step between them and then that sudden, startling change of pace. Forty metres later, he’s diving to get the ball down with one hand in the corner.

Keep watching and you’ll see him spill the ball twice under no pressure. Same bloke. Same afternoon. For all those rough edges, he still walked off with 26 points.

In between came the 50-22. Italy had just conceded to Malcolm Marx and kicked off, hoping to pin the Springboks in their own half. Feinberg-Mngomezulu sent the ball the other way, landing it infield and watching it skip into touch inside the Italian 22. Then he puffed out his lips and twirled his finger round and round, as if the whole world were a piece of string under his command. Cocky? Of course. He was celebrating a kick to touch before his forwards had even formed the lineout. They won it and Siya Kolisi scored. If you’re going to celebrate early, it helps to have the Springbok pack in front of you.

Later, his instrumented gumshield triggered a head injury assessment and Damian Willemse came on in his place. As Feinberg-Mngomezulu went off, he appeared to blank his Stormers teammate. Did he snub him? Some on social media took it as further evidence of an attitude problem.

I saw a prodigious fly-half who hated being taken out of a game he was tearing apart. If you already think he’s a ‘windgat’ upstart who can’t bear anyone else being the centre of attention, you probably saw someone being a jerk to his mate. That’s a lot of character analysis to squeeze out of a few seconds of television.

The passage I keep coming back to is that kick and what followed it. Imagine being an Italian forward. You’ve just peeled yourself off the turf after failing to stop a maul. You trudge back to halfway, watch the restart sail downfield and start running. Seconds later you’re walking back towards your own line to do the whole bloody thing again. That was the feeling of the first half in Turin. A bottle-green tidal wave you could see coming from the top row of the Allianz Stadium. By the 25th minute South Africa had scored five tries. By half-time it was 45-0.

Italy came into the game ranked 11th, ten places below the Boks, and were missing Michele Lamaro, Tommaso Menoncello and Juan Ignacio Brex. Their only victory over South Africa came in Florence in 2016, when they won 20-18 against an Allister Coetzee side that had shipped 57 points to the All Blacks in Durban and lost by 16 at Twickenham the week before. That was a wretched Springbok team. Rassie Erasmus resisted the temptation to rotate. He picked Ox Nche, Marx, Kolisi and Pieter-Steph du Toit in the pack and Damian de Allende and Jesse Kriel in midfield. When Italy conceded an early penalty under their own posts, the Boks took the three points.

If you want to know how seriously Erasmus took Italy, look at the team he’s named for France. Fourteen of the 15 who actually started in Turin are named to start in Paris on Friday. The only change is at tighthead, where Wilco Louw trades places with Thomas du Toit. Twenty-two of the matchday 23 are the same, with Cobus Reinach replacing Grant Williams on the bench. Erasmus said he wanted “to select a settled squad for this game to build momentum in the competition”. A team good enough to take to the Stade de France was the team he thought Italy should have to face.

The Boks made 423 metres to Italy’s 203 from just 13 more carries. They made 12 clean breaks to two and scored three tries directly from mauls. Feinberg-Mngomezulu landed all ten kicks at goal. Even with time up and the margin already 52 points, South Africa ran a set move for Ethan Hooker to score the ninth try. The bonus point was long since secured. They had a scrum and a chance to score, so they did because that is what ruthlessness looks like.

The second half was scruffier. Italy’s scrum found some purchase and Federico Ruzza scored after the hour. “They made the most of their opportunities and caused us problems in the scrum,” Erasmus said. Morne van den Berg, the player of the match, sounded almost pleased to have something to take into training. “There’s a lot to improve on in our game, which is actually quite exciting,” he said.

Feinberg-Mngomezulu called it a “reality check”. That’s quite a thing to hear from someone who so ostentatiously celebrated a kick to touch. It’s quite a thing for France to hear from the fly-half of a side that just put 66 points on a Test team. A player who can take such obvious pleasure in what he did to Italy can also walk into the dressing room and feel there was more to be had.

I hope he keeps celebrating kicks like that. His desire to steal the show fits right in with a team that wants to dominate every Test it plays. These Springboks are like Roman legionaries. It’s not enough just to trample over the known world. They’re doing so with their chests out and wry smiles on their faces.