LONG READ 'If the Boks' beauty doesn't get you, its Bomb Squad beast certainly will'

If it was a soap opera on the telly, the 2025 Rugby Championship would have drawn an audience of Dallas type proportions. There were twists and turns in the plot aplenty, but ultimately the story had the same ending. South Africa and New Zealand are still ahead of Argentina and Australia. The ‘haves’ kept the lion’s share of the spoils, and the ‘have-nots’ were kicked out of the big house at the end of the street. Cliff Barnes is still playing second fiddle to good old boy JR Ewing.

The Springboks won back-to-back Rugby Championship titles for the first time since the Tri-Nations competition started in 1996. The 2024/2025 ‘repeat’ is yet another significant milestone in the coaching career of Rassie Erasmus. Rassie’s Boks do not pay attention to the vagaries of the soap opera; they are too busy creating a story of their own.

The new narrative being written in the Republic is a variation on the theme of Beauty and the Beast. The story is only in its early chapters and the pair of future lovers are on speaking terms, but there is already evidence of a powerful chemistry between the two. Right now, if the Tony Brown-inspired beauty of the new South African attack doesn’t get you, the ‘Bomb Squad’ beast probably will.

Although Rassie has played it cool by selecting a 5-3 bench for most of South Africa’s Rugby Championship matches, the depth in the front row remains the same as when the Bomb Squad was first introduced ahead of the 2019 World Cup. Six years ago, there were six international-quality front row voorspelers available in the shape of Tendai ‘Beast’ Mtawarira and Steven Kitshoff at loose-head prop, Malcolm Marx and Bongi Mbonambi at hooker and Frans Malherbe and Vincent Koch on the right side of the skrum.

Kitshoff and Erasmus recently revisited the forging of the Bomb Squad on the Rassie+ podcast. As the now retired Stormers redhead recalled:

“You called all the front-rows together: myself, Malcolm, Vinnie, Beast, Bongi, Frans and Thomas [du Toit], and it was in this little boardroom.

“You made a speech, and you asked ‘Would you prefer to be on the field at the beginning of the game? Or would you be there when the final whistle goes, and you get cheers because you’ve won?

“And I remember Beast standing up and saying ‘Coach, I want to be on the field from the start.’”

In the pod, Erasmus replies, “I actually think that if you guys didn’t buy into it then, it wouldn’t have started. Because who do you pick between you and Beast?” Who indeed. If you have six front-rowers of that quality, you want the best from all of them. The Bomb Squad idea gelled with the pattern of Rassie’s thinking when he took hold of the coaching reins in 2018.

He felt some unique Springbok scrummaging DNA had been lost in the pyrotechnic try-scoring fireworks of Super Rugby. As ex-Saracens and Western Province hooker Schalk Brits told Planet Rugby before the 2023 World Cup began:

“When Rassie Erasmus took over as Springbok coach, we had a long discussion about scrummaging, and why we weren’t quite as dominant as teams in the past. We talked about how it was part of the DNA of Springbok rugby, and Rassie asked us to embrace it as a key part of our overall strategy.

“We said to him ‘Well, we can’t scrum for penalties in every scrum’.

“Rassie smiled and replied, ‘Why not? This can be the weapon that differentiates us from the rest. It doesn’t matter if there’s two or 20 scrums in the match, you can fight for a penalty in each and every one, and that’s exactly what I want you to aim for.’

“Rassie made us think of complete dominance, of having the mindset of relishing and getting excited for every single opportunity to scrummage.

“He designed the 6-2 split on the bench as a big part of this, and he asked us to no longer think of ourselves as 1,2,3 and 16,17,18 but as two integral units of the team…

“We want to be absolutely feared. We want to be met with groans of frustration and sweats of trepidation as our opponents struggle to think about how they are going to contain the next wave of power and the next front-row they [have to] face.”

If you don’t believe that the scrum makes a difference in the modern game, take a look at the scrum penalty differential stats from the past two Rugby Championships in 2024 and 2025.

The overall pattern is very similar from one season to the next, and South Africa is way out ahead of its rivals. Over the course of 12 matches, the Springboks understood they would receive 26 ‘free passes’ from the referee. If you begin the game knowing you can rely on at least two or three penalties guaranteed to either relieve pressure on your own goal-line, or gain access to opposition ‘red zone’, you are effectively starting every game with a one-score advantage.

At the old cabbage path in the climactic final match of the 2025 tournament, the two-pronged front-row threat won six scrum penalties to Argentina’s one, and added one turnover when the Pumas suffered the indignity of being pushed off their own feed by a seven-man pack. Three of those penalties led to positions which resulted directly in a try for the myrtle-and-gold.

As Rassie commented crisply in Kobe back in 2019, “The Bomb Squad either come in and fix it when it is not going well on the park – or it is a false alarm and maybe they don’t even get onto the park.” With the beauty of the attacking connection between Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu and Damian Willemse firing only fitfully at Twickenham, it was left to the Bomb Squad beast to finish the job.

Beast Mtawarira may have retired, but If anything the latest iteration of the Bomb Squad is even more powerful, and inspires even more shock and awe than its predecessor. The starting combination of Ox Nche, Malcolm Marx and Thomas du Toit probably does more initial damage, and on Saturday afternoon Jan-Hendrik Wessels, Bongi and 144kg Wilco Louw came off the bench to apply the final flourishes. When Gerhard Steenekamp returns from injury to the loosehead slot and Wessels moves to his natural position as a 120kg rake, it will get even stronger. Three Bulls make for one overpowering beast from the bench.

The Pumas lost their starting tight-head, and their only prop of current international stature on either side of the front row in Joel Sclavi, before the game ever started. The groans of frustration and sweats of trepidation as his replacement Francisco Coria Marchetti struggled to think about how he was going to contain the next wave of power and the next front-row he had to face were plainly audible. Coria Marchetti plies his trade in the ProD2 for Brive, and even the tough hombres in the French second division have nothing on the world champions.

The escalation from conventional to nuclear was evident as early as the ninth minute of the game.

Pieter-Steph du Toit may be standing off as the emergency scrum-half, but seven South African forwards are sufficient to push eight Argentines off the ball and Julián Montoya cannot even raise his foot to strike.

When South Africa established an attacking five-metre scrum position late in the first period it illustrated the problem for Argentina in black and white. The try was a foregone conclusion: two penalties gave the Bokke license to explore the attacking possibilities under advantage, knowing they could still return to source to apply the killer blow.

The bind employed by Springbok tight-head Du Toit is worthy of note. ‘The Tank’ uses an under-grip on his hooker’s shorts, and that gives him maximum flexibility to alter his position to advantage in the gap between the opposing loose-head and hooker.

A succession of penalties from scrum also granted South Africa the ability to build scores from their favourite short-range lineout starter platform, with the Pumas living under the ever-present threat of a yellow card for multiple offences at the set-piece.

Maul work is done on ‘feel’, and nobody does it better than the Boks. As soon as all three of Jasper Wiese, Ruan Nortjé and Eben Etzebeth are propped upright on the infield corner of the drive, no more progress can be made in that direction and the Springboks feel their way around to the flag-side edge instead, with Marx dotting down in the corner. The next scrum penalty set up another close-range attacking lineout situation which South Africa were able to convert.

If your hooker is under such pressure that he cannot even lift his foot to strike for the ball on a squint feed, it becomes almost impossible to play the game at this level. Du Toit and Louw on the South African tighthead have supplied that pressure in the second half of the Rugby Championship outstandingly.

The one ray of scrum sunshine for the Albiceleste broke the cloud cover in the 76^th minute.

With 23-year-old Harlequins rookie Boris Wenger on the loose-head, and Toulousain Tomás Rapetti fresh out the U20s World Championship on the other side, Argentine scrummaging finally has something to celebrate.

When beauty of their Tony Brown attack cannot get the job done, there is always the Bomb Squad beast to fly to the rescue. The front-row picks up the slack when the offensive bits and pieces do not gel – ‘the Bomb Squad come in and fix it when it is not going well on the park’ as the man himself declared.

By the end of the Rugby Championship, order had been restored and the world champions were back on top after losing two of their first three matches. In the second half of the tournament, they scored 19 tries and compiled 139 points at an average of over six tries and 43 points per game. Those are the facts of life. Even the Bomb Squad is not standing still, it is getting better. One Ox and another Tank outweigh even the biggest of Beasts.