By Peter Bills
Peter Bills analyses Saturday's Tri-Nations Test at Newlands...
A towering mountain overlooks this beautiful rugby ground and a towering rugby player graced it yesterday.
Richie McCaw gave one of the greatest displays in world rugby history to shatter the new world champions in their own backyard. South Africa finished a fumbling, disorganised, broken outfit, laid to waste by the genius of McCaw on the floor, and his brilliant reading of the game allied to coruscating tackling.
Down the years, the All Blacks have always produced some special flankers: Waka Nathan, Andy Leslie, Graham Mourie and Michael Jones to name just a few. But McCaw's performance before a disbelieving 50 000 crowd at Cape Town was fit to put him into that hallowed group.
McCaw, a wonderfully inspirational New Zealand captain, gave Schalk Burger a rugby lesson in accuracy and precision.
The Springbok lacks nothing in courage and commitment but when it came to detail, McCaw was in a class of his own on the field. He won the loose ball constantly, cleverly slowed it down when the situation required that, read the play intelligently and made tackle after tackle.
There wasn't a single player on the field at Newlands in his class.
Chiefly due to McCaw, New Zealand ended up winning at a canter. They were without the ball for long periods, which seems to be no bad thing in the modern game, and they could even afford the luxury of seeing Daniel Carter miss kick after kick, spraying the ball all around in the in-goal area with a shocking display of goal kicking.
Carter landed one kick out of eight, missing four penalties, two drop goals and a conversion. It was an astonishing lapse by one of the world's top kickers, yet it never mattered because New Zealand were able to impose such an effective blanket defence that the Springboks never looked like breaking through. New Zealand's scrambling in defence was consistently excellent and denied the Springboks a breakthrough.
But South Africa had themselves to blame for their finishing was poor. They had several try-scoring chances, two clear ones in the first half, but on each occasion Adi Jacobs wasted the opportunities. Once, he went alone and lost possession near the All Blacks line, and then threw a forward pass to Percy Montgomery.
We'd seen it all during the week: funny wigs, celebratory cakes and backslaps all round for Percy Montgomery. The players had been busy socially too but alas, the fuss and fanfare surrounding Montgomery's 100th Test had faded into the background long before the winter chill eclipsed the sunshine at Newlands.
Delivering on the day is the name of this particular game, and the Boks didn't do it on Saturday. Their failure meant they missed a golden chance to take a decisive hold on the 2008 Tri-Nations title and they also probably hastened the development and maturity of Graham Henry's side.
For them to come here and win so decisively was a marvellous testimony to the inimitable duo of pride and self belief which underpins every New Zealand side, and which is constantly inculcated within the players by their coaching staff.
On a day when the sun had fairly sparkled on the waters of Cape Town harbour, it was only the visitors who matched that brightness.
The Springboks were dull, predictable and without much finesse. They kicked abysmally for the most part, lacked creativity and authority at half back and became ever more anxious as things refused to go for them. In the end, they looked a pale shadow of world champions, humiliated in their own land by a New Zealand team that is only just being built.
The Boks had talked a good game all week, made plenty of room for the fun and frivolities. But you had to say by last night that they'd got the preparation all wrong and some serious thinking needs to be done ahead of next Saturday's Test in Durban.
For sure, the wily Robbie Deans will have taken careful note of the Springboks' many failings here, not least their disturbing lack of direction when John Smit is missing.
Blaming the referee is an old excuse - South Africa have to look at themselves this morning, put their hands up and confess that they got this one horribly wrong.