'They look quite flat': How the Springboks can nullify the All Blacks

Schalk Burger has described South Africa’s 2023 Rugby Championship encounter with the All Blacks as the “perfect example” of how the world champions should not play against their rivals.

The 2007 World Cup winner singled out the first 30 minutes of that match at Mt Smart Stadium last year as an exemplar of how the Springboks played into the All Blacks’ hands, as the hosts played with plenty of width to build a 20-3 half-time lead before winning the match 35-20. 

Speaking on the latest episode of RugbyPass TV’s Boks Office, Burger said that Rassie Erasmus’s side must force the All Blacks to “tighten up” ahead of their first meeting on Saturday at Ellis Park since the World Cup final last year.

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The key to winning the match is to “boss that gainline”, according to the former flanker, and he believes that usually comes from playing with width for the All Blacks.

On the other hand, it does not matter to Burger how the Springboks win that gainline battle with the ball, whether that is by playing direct or by finding space out wide under the new philosophy from attack coach Tony Brown.

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“Where you can’t underestimate them is how physical the All Blacks are, they are bloody hard,” the former World Rugby player of the year said.

“And they know when they play against the Boks, in set piece they always find a way to compete. The breakdown, they always seem to get a couple of turnovers. You’ve got to try and boss that gainline as the Boks, it doesn’t matter how we do it, whether it’s passing it out the back, finding space out wide. But gainline’s key for us.

“It’s similar to their attack. If you get them to carry and tighten up, then they look quite flat, the All Blacks. But when they play an offloading game, they kick contestables, you don’t form a ruck first off, they’ve got the ability to offload and get some of their ball players in space – Mt Smart was a perfect example of that where the Boks were chasing shadows for the first 30 minutes.”

Burger noted that in the past the way to beat the Boks was to play very little rugby, stating that having targets to hit is what “gets us South Africans going”. He singled out England’s narrow loss to Erasmus’ side at the World Cup last year as the blueprint for victory.

Times have changed though, and the South African no longer thinks the Boks get their energy from their defence, rather their attack under Brown. This is a new puzzle to solve for the All Blacks then, though they had not successfully solved the last one.

“We often find a lot of space when we do play against them, but it’s also not overplaying your hand,” Burger said.

“It will be interesting to see what Razor does. You go back to that Rugby World Cup final, we came from the semi where England didn’t play any rugby. There were no targets for us to hit, and that’s what gets us South Africans going.

“If they play a kick-early game, the long game, our back three will run it back first and foremost, but if they don’t create those targets where Pieter-Steph [du Toit] makes 28 tackles and nine of them are showstoppers and it seems all big nine were on Jordie Barrett, where does our energy come from? From our latest philosophy, I think our energy will come from our attack.”