All Blacks assistant coach Ian Foster looked graciously bemused, if that makes sense, when he was asked if the Boks had reverted to a win-at-all costs attitude since returning from their disastrous overseas leg of the Rugby Championship.
“I don’t think it is possible that they ever diverted from that,” said Foster, a wise and venerable rugby man that played a record 148 times for Waikato and has been All Blacks’ head coach Steven Hansen’s assistant for the last four years.
“The Boks are the same as us – they want to win every Test, whatever it takes. I guess the question is whether they have changed the way they want to play,” he said. “Well that is for them to comment on but I can assure you the Boks are going out to Kings Park on Saturday to beat us with a plan they feel is best for them, and it is up to us to counter that while looking after what we do best.”
At the heart of the debate about the Springbok game plan is the confused tactics in the June series against Ireland that had one foot in the Lions’ attacking prowess in getting to the Super Rugby final and the other in a half-hearted recognition of the realities of International Rugby.
And the selection of Morne Steyn against the Wallabies in Pretoria last week suggested to the public that coach Allister Coetzee had sacrificed the ambition of an attacking game going forward on the altar of winning at all costs.
Well good on Coetzee. Elton Jantjies had his chances but did not work out, Handre Pollard has been injured all year and Patrick Lambie is feeling his way back into rugby from injury.
Steyn? For heaven’s sake this is the man who was at 10 when the Boks beat the All Blacks three times in a row in 2009. He can’t be that bad! In Durban, funnily enough, he scored all 31 points in the 31-19 win in 2009. Earlier that year he had kicked the penalty to win the Boks the series against the British and Irish Lions.
In 2011, Steyn kicked all 18 points when the Boks beat the All Blacks in Port Elizabeth, including a drop goal.
If Allister Coetzee is looking for a way to beat the All Blacks at Kings Park on Saturday, who can blame him for picking a proven match winner? When you are playing the best team in the world (by a country mile), you find a way to win, and Steyn can do that for the Boks.
Foster, ever the diplomat, said this of Steyn’s recall.
“It is not a surprise they picked him, he is a quality player and we have been preparing for a while for either him or Elton (Jantjies). They have different styles but I think it is only marginal when you consider that the Boks kicked only 25 times against the Wallabies last week, which is not that much at Test level,” Foster said. “I think it is a myth that they kick too much.
“But it is also about how well you kick, and when the opposition kicks they open the door for a counter-attack, but if the kick is accurate it can put the defence under pressure,” Foster said. ‘Look, the Boks did not have a lot of possession against the Wallabies, which is not unusual because the Aussies are very good at ball retention, and the Boks would have felt a need to kick to get territory.”
Foster said that the Boks had not gone into their shell against the Aussies but had rather been forced to deal with a situation of having little possession.
“I don’t see a major shift from the Boks in terms of wanting to move the ball,” he said. “They want to win at all costs as much as we do, and they will look to find a way to do it whoever is at flyhalf."
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