Cape Town - There were injury concerns over Bryan Habana and Duane Vermeulen in the aftermath of South Africa’s 28-10 triumph over Australia on Saturday.
However, these may be of secondary importance for coach Heyneke Meyer, who will head into this week’s engagement, against world champions New Zealand at Ellis Park, fretting about a hot-rod attacking performance in which the wheels almost came off.
JP Pietersen replaced Habana in the first half after South Africa’s all-time leading try-scorer left the field with a possible concussion, while a rib injury saw Vermeulen exit at the start of the fourth quarter.
While Meyer was hoping for good news on both players, he may have spent much of the past 36 hours contemplating ways to tighten up what was a loose performance for the most part.
“I thought we played some great rugby,” the Bok coach told reporters after the four-try victory.
“But we got frustrated at times and kept the ball too much and should have been more tactical, but it did wear them down.”
As Eben Etzebeth put it, “the dam wall broke” in the final 10 minutes as the Boks blitzed their rivals with a haul of 20 points.
“We never planned to leave it that late, but we always said that if we stick to our structures in the first 60 to 70 minutes, we could break them down in the last 10, and it came down to that,” said two-try hero Jean de Villiers.
“We believe in what we do for the first 70 minutes. I mean, from the kick-off in the first half, we were able to hold the ball for close to 20 phases, so we might not get the result then, but at the end of the game you get the points.
“It’s being able to break teams down and get the reward in the last 10 minutes, and that’s what we did.”
Clearly the Bok captain believes that the purple patch at the end was teed up by an attritional ground-attack. Meyer credited the impact of grizzled veterans off the bench.
“You get lots of criticism for picking old guys, but I said I wanted more experienced guys on the bench and I said they must up the tempo and I thought they were really brilliant,” said the coach. “Schalk Burger was a brilliant impact player.”
It’s worth noting that Australia must beat Argentina in Mendoza this week to clinch their first away win in the Rugby Championship this season.
They conceded six tries and 51 points when they fronted the All Blacks in Auckland earlier this year. In that match, the hosts kicked three times more than the Wallabies, and made a total of nine more ball-carries in the space of 80 minutes.
At Newlands, the Boks carried the ball 130 times more than the tourists and, with 10 minutes to go, trailed 10-8 on the scoreboard.
“It’s just handling errors that’s giving our possession away,” Vermeulen said in a field-side interview at half-time. “We need to get our structure back. If we’re in structure we can out-perform these guys.”
Outstanding scramble defence saw the Boks clean up 24 handling errors and a sizeable deficit in turnovers, but it was the absence of lethal tacticians in the Wallabies line-up that ultimately allowed the hosts to get away with loose, heads-up rugby.
Nick Phipps, Bernard Foley and Israel Folau feature as lead characters in Australia’s attacking road show, but they all have a boot like an economy car rental - too insignificant to warrant a mention.
That won’t be the case at Ellis Park where Aaron Smith, Beauden Barrett and Israel Dagg won’t feel like they have to apologise to the New Zealand rugby public for a high-volume kicking game.
The All Blacks out-kicked Argentina for a 34-13 win in La Plata on Saturday night that saw the world champions retain the Rugby Championship trophy with one game to spare.
Even though the outcome of the match will be purely academic, the 2014 season will go down as a successful one for the Boks if they clinch their first win against New Zealand under Meyer.
It will be considered a failure if they don’t.
Cape Argus