The greatest rivalry in rugby, All Blacks versus Springboks, is the biggest draw the sport has to offer. With the rapid improvement of the All Blacks under new head coach Dave Rennie allied to the crushing weight of history, it could turn out to be the most searching test of Rassie Erasmus’ coaching career to date.
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A deep dive into the raw stats produced by the first three rounds of the Nations Championship only whets the appetite for the seven-week tour of the Republic which begins on 7 August, with a game between the Stormers and the visitors in the shadow of Cape Town’s Table Mountain.
The shape of the game and a bold new statement of Kiwi rugby identity in the Rennie/Sir Graham Henry era suggest the All Blacks are capable of not only mounting a serious challenge to Erasmus’ charges, they could even launch a coup d’état and seize the throne. Now wouldn’t that be something?
The shape of the game
A comparison of the past three major international tournaments north and south of the equator – the 2025 Rugby Championship, the 2026 Six Nations and the 2026 Nations Championship – indicates the overall trend is towards ever more attacking content: more points, more tries, more rucks and fewer penalties. The two most recent tournaments, the Six Nations and Nations Championship, lead the way, torch in hand.
The 12-team Nations Championship includes a wider spread of rugby nations, and more imbalanced match-ups than a regular Six Nations or Rugby Championship. But that only partly explains the increase in scoring profile, and it does not account for the drop in penalty awards or the upsurge in the number of rucks built per game.
There were three and a half minutes more ball-in-play time at the 2026 Six Nations, and one and half more minutes at the Nations Championship compared to the southern hemisphere gold standard, the Rugby Championship. The game is becoming more fluid with every major iteration.
There is also much less of a true contest at the set-piece. Teams at the Rugby Championship were winning 84% of their own lineout ball, at the Six Nations the retention rate rose to 90%, and it increased further to 91% at the Nations Championship. Some 94% of the scrums at the most recent tournament were won by the feeding team, with the balance of penalties and free-kicks also weighing heavily in favour of the side with the put-in.
Scrums remain the bugbear of the professional game, often consuming as much as one fifth of overall game time while only producing clean usable ball on just over 50% of occasions.
Why the All Blacks will be tougher to beat in 2026
Since the unexpected ascension of ex-Chiefs and Glasgow coach Rennie to the national throne, and the appointment of Henry as his selector-in-chief, the All Blacks have undergone radical surgery and discovered a new playing identity, and that means it will be South Africa having to make most of the adjustments on the Greatest Rivalry tour. Compare the following two tables.
The new sense of New Zealand identity is something to behold. Scott Robertson’s All Blacks were trying to play the Springboks at their own game – very similar ball-in-play time and time of possession, no difference in the number of rucks set or speed of ball delivered from them.
Robertson and forwards coach Jase Ryan favoured the selection of a heavyweight tight five. But with Rennie calling the shots, tight forwards have been asked to drop weight and focus on their skills instead. Asafo Aumua and Ethan De Groot were two of the front rowers who featured in the 40-21 win over Ireland in the third round.
“I know I was eating quite a bit,” Aumua reflected recently. “I was a bit heavy heading into pre-season. But, happy to be back in decent, or good enough, nick to play the game.
“I lied to our nutritionist. I said I was 124kg, but I was actually 126kg. Now I’m 116kg. I was probably just eating too much. I was eating probably double the portions I should have been. But, I’m back to eating properly now.”
De Groot added: “He [Rennie] is allowing us to back skill and have a crack, so yeah, I’m enjoying that side of the game.
“It’s funny because ‘Barnsey’ [assistant coach Neil Barnes] actually gave me s**t for having no skills so I’ve been working hard on trying to prove him wrong with a bit of razzle.”
The results are there in the glaring black and white of the stats: games involving Rennie’s All Blacks have featured five minutes more ball-in-play, seven minutes more active time of possession and 55 more rucks built per game than Robertson’s, while the average ruck speed was one full second quicker at the Nations Championship than it was in the Rugby Championship.
Suddenly the All Blacks are recognisably themselves again. When the hooter sounded to mark the end of proceedings against Ireland, Aumua recalled skipper Ardie Savea’s command – to keep looking for another score. There was going to be no let-up in intensity.
“His message was ‘we’re not going to wind down the clock. We’re going to play.’ It’s been a constant throughout the series as well. Just trying to keep the ball moving, keep it alive. Try not to give the opposition a rest.”
The new firm of ‘Rennie and Ted’ has also taken positive steps to fix two gaping holes in the Razor resumé, the desire to score off turnover ball and a drastic drop-off in performance in the fourth quarter of games.
Where the Springboks are ahead of the game
The New Zealand set-piece still needs fixing. The lineout finished dead last at the Nations Championship with an 83% retention rate, compared to a Springbok set-piece running at 94%, even in the absence of 141-cap veteran Eben Etzebeth and experienced caller Lood de Jager.
Fabian Holland cannot return to national colours quickly enough, with the giant Dutchman having completed a tentative 40-minute stint with Otago in the NPC at the weekend. It was his first taste of rugby since dislocating a shoulder in Super Rugby pre-season on 6th February. Holland won 36 lineouts at the Rugby Championship last year, 20 more than the top Springbok [Etzebeth] and a dozen more than the next man, Wallaby Nick Frost. Whether he is partnered by Tupou Vaa’I, Josh Lord or Sam Darry, he will be an essential component of Kiwi success in South Africa. It will be a race against time to get him fully fit.
The scrum will be a bone of philosophical contention. Where the All Blacks envisage a restart and a launchpad for multi-phase attack, the Boks will want to use the scrum as a platform to win penalties, score quickly and terminally damage the morale of the opposition.
Ultimately, for all their considerable improvement over the Nations Championship, New Zealand will have to match South Africa’s sheer efficiency at scoring points, and this will be the toughest task of all.
The South African scoring model remains more efficient than New Zealand’s. Although the current All Blacks are creating many more line breaks per carry than Robertson’s side did at TRC 2025, they still need to make as many carries to score a try in 2026 as they did one year previously. The Springbok offence, featuring more kicks and fewer carries, is leaner and more efficient at delivering tries quickly – and it may just have gotten hotter in July.
New Zealand have already established a clear-cut new identity under the auspices of Rennie and Henry. There is no longer any lingering doubt about how the All Blacks want to play the game. As Scotland showed in the second round of the Nations Championship, the new style will be good enough to inconvenience one of the greatest Springbok sides in history. It could even be enough to win a couple of Test matches. Will it be sufficient to carry off the spoils in a series for only the second time in the history of the Greatest Rivalry? The stats tale told at scrum, lineout and in the scoring efficiency table says “probably not”.
But if they can win, these All Blacks will experience the same euphoria as Zinzan Brooke at Loftus Versveld in Pretoria 30 years ago: “I was absolutely knackered on the bloody ground but just thinking, ‘S**t, we’ve done it.’ That was a moment in time where you think, ‘Right, we’ve done it!’ And for me, it just closes a massive door in life.”
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The one stat that’s missing is the number of completed tackles on Jordie Barrett by PSDT, yoy.
The rest is just noise.
Discuss.
I don’t think anyone didn't already think the ABs couldn’t test the boks to the max. These two teams have been testing each other to the max for decades. It’s a two horse race until the QF of the RWC 2027 from here on out.
Nick, do you think the lack of bonus points or points differential as key factors will have any impact on this series? I.e., could the tests be played more like WC knock-out games or Lions tests than TRC, 6N or NC games?
This is an excellent point. I for one am looking forward to the good old test vibe. Not this basketball stuff everyone’s getting their knickers knotted over these days.
Tight testes for me.
Interesting read as always. Agree that the scrum could be a major issue for the All Blacks. Nothing I’ve seen under Rennie suggests the ABs will be able to handle what’s coming their way. If the first AB scrum buckles badly it could set the tone for not just the first test but the entire series. The Boks get a lot of confidence and energy from their scrum. It was a monster scrum just after half time in the last game against the ABs in Wellington that sparked the avalanche of points that followed. And it was another scrum destruction in the game before that (at Eden Park) - where the ABs were shoved off the ball - that also swung the momentum and saw the Boks almost turn that game around. With the introduction of Sadie and Porthen the Bok scrum is even more powerful in 2026. Meanwhile, the ABs couldn’t budge an Ireland scrum the Boks shoved into the Irish Sea last year. Yes, the all-out attack by the ABs is extremely dangerous but they’ve not been faultless and there have been a lot of handling errors. That means scrums…
I just can’t get my head around just how much Daan Human is looking forward to and preparing for this series. Jaysus.
I think Nick Bishop has written a fascinating article, but the deeper you go into the statistics, the less convincing the conclusion becomes. The piece is presented as a data-driven case that Dave Rennie’s All Blacks are about to push the Springboks to the edge. In reality, many of the numbers describe a different style of rugby, not necessarily a better or more dangerous one.
Let’s start with the opening claim that the All Blacks have undergone “radical surgery” and discovered a bold new identity. Three matches against France, Italy and a aging Ireland side are suddenly treated as proof of a completed transformation. If South Africa changed coaches and produced three high-tempo July performances, I suspect we would be warned not to overreact to a small sample size. When New Zealand does it, apparently we are witnessing the rebirth of rugby civilization.
The tournament-wide trends are another example. More points, more tries, more rucks and fewer penalties are presented as evidence that the game is becoming more fluid and that this somehow favors the All Blacks. But tournament trends are not team-specific evidence. A 12-team competition with several mismatched fixtures will naturally inflate scoring and ruck counts. Nick Bishop acknowledges this, then quietly proceeds as though the caveat barely matters.
The set-piece section may be the most revealing. He argues that lineouts are becoming less contestable because retention rates have risen from 84% to 91%. That sounds dramatic until you remember that elite international lineouts have been heavily retention-dominated for years. An increase of a few percentage points does not mean the contest has disappeared; it means teams are increasingly prioritizing secure possession. The irony is that he uses this trend to suggest a broader shift away from the very area where South Africa currently holds a significant advantage.
Then comes the headline statistical flourish: Rennie’s All Blacks have five more minutes of ball-in-play, seven more minutes of possession, 55 more rucks per game, and one second quicker ruck speed than Robertson’s side.
This is where the article moves from analysis into marketing.
More rucks do not equal more dominance. They often mean a team is taking more phases to achieve the same outcome. More possession does not equal more pressure. We have watched countless international matches where teams hold the ball for long periods and score less efficiently than opponents who play with better territory, kicking strategy and transition attack.
In fact, Nick Bishop accidentally undermines his own argument later in the article when he admits that New Zealand still need as many carries to score a try as they did in 2025, while South Africa remain the more efficient scoring side. That is the statistical equivalent of saying: “The new sports car revs much louder, uses more fuel, and reaches the finish line in the same time.”
The Aumua and De Groot weight-loss anecdotes are entertaining, but they are not evidence of a superior Test blueprint. International rugby is littered with stories of players getting leaner, fitter, faster and more skilful. The Springboks have been doing exactly that for years while still dominating collisions, scrums and mauls. Losing ten kilograms is not a tactical revolution; it is a preseason update.
The fourth-quarter graph is also treated as a major breakthrough. Yet South Africa have built their entire recent success on overwhelming teams late through bench impact, territorial pressure and set-piece attrition. If the argument is that New Zealand have improved in the final quarter, fair enough. If the argument is that they have suddenly overtaken the best late-game side in world rugby, the evidence simply is not there.
Now to the Scotland reference, which made me chuckle. Nick Bishop says Scotland showed the new All Black style can “inconvenience” the Springboks. A rotated Springbok side conceding line breaks in a July fixture becomes a meaningful warning sign, but New Zealand’s own defensive issues and lineout struggles are treated as temporary technical details awaiting Fabian Holland’s return like a superhero entering in Act Three.
Speaking of Fabian Holland, the article leans heavily on his 36 lineout wins from the 2025 Rugby Championship. Useful player, excellent prospect, but lineout wins are not a magic currency that transfers automatically into dominance over South Africa. If raw lineout counts determined Test outcomes, analysts would be handing out trophies based on Excel spreadsheets before kickoff.
The scrum section is where the philosophical contrast is real. New Zealand see a restart; South Africa see a weapon. Nick Bishop seems to view the Springbok approach as slightly old-world, as though winning penalties, territory and psychological pressure at scrum time is somehow less sophisticated than launching 14-phase sequences. The scoreboard has shown remarkable tolerance for South Africa’s supposedly unfashionable methods.
And that brings us to the final contradiction.
The article spends most of its length building excitement about New Zealand’s new identity, faster ruck ball, increased possession, more active play, improved turnover attack and stronger finishing power. Then, after all that, the decisive tables still say South Africa are better at the scrum, better at the lineout, and better at scoring efficiency.
So the ultimate conclusion is: New Zealand are dramatically improved, radically transformed, statistically exciting, philosophically reborn… and still probably not as good as South Africa in the areas that decide Test series.
That is quite a journey.
Nick Bishop has essentially written a trailer for a blockbuster in which the hero gets a new haircut, a faster motorcycle, and an inspirational soundtrack, only for the final scene to reveal that the Springboks still own the map, the fuel, and the finish line.
When your own statistics spend an entire article trying to prove the All Blacks have evolved, but still end by admitting the Springboks remain superior at scrum, lineout and scoring efficiency, you have not produced a case for a coup d’état.
You have produced a very sophisticated explanation for why South Africa are still favorites.