Springbok coach Rassie Erasmus started the now completed first phase of the 2026 international rugby season in Gqeberha four weeks ago with a clear twin stream mission that was comfortably accomplished.
It wasn’t only the world champions ending the home leg of the inaugural Nations Championship where they are accustomed to being, at the top of their section of the log after a 43-0 win over Wales at Hollywoodbets Kings Park, that South African rugby supporters were celebrating on Saturday night. There was also the Junior Springboks’ 16-5 win over France in the World Junior Championship final in Georgia.
Due to the delayed start to the game because of lightning, those of us who were at the Durban game were able to watch much of it on the television screens in the press centre. And in many ways, as has been the case throughout this still fledgling international season, it was like someone had pressed a save-get key. The juniors, with the way their physicality took systematic control of their final, were a replica of their senior team.
Pieter-Steph du Toit keeps saying it in his role as stand-in Bok skipper and he is right - it is the systems that sets up the Boks and there is now enough depth bubbling in SA rugby for it to not matter as much as it used to who is wearing the Bok jersey in a given game. The game system is well understood and the plans followed with clarity, and the results have followed.
SEASON STARTED IN GQEBERHA WITH DUAL MISSION
In that aforementioned Gqeberha weekend Erasmus had a dual mission. He was using the unofficial international against the Barbarians as a warmup to the first phase of the season that began with the first Nations Championship game against England in Johannesburg two weeks later. And in the South Africa A game he was looking even further ahead, towards the next World Cup cycle, in his selections for the curtain-raiser at the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium against Zimbabwe.
The weekend turned out well for him. Riley Norton was one of the stars of the win over the Barbarians, to the point that he was included in the Bok senior squad. The man who led the Junior Boks to their initial Junior World Championship triumph was subsequently injured and took no part in the Nations Championship matches, but his SA under-20 teammate from last year, Vusi Moyo, did. He made his debut at No 10 against Wales.
It was a nervy start for Moyo but you’d expect that from the youngest ever player to start in the Bok No 10 jersey. He is just 20 years old. And as the game endured, he started to come more into his own, and he made an important contribution with the cross kick on the stroke of halftime that sent Jesse Kriel in for his team’s third try.
That ensured that one of the things evident in the first two Championship matches wasn’t completed. This time the Boks scored points in the second quarter, courtesy of that try. In the games against England and Scotland they didn’t.
Is the apparent fade in that period that appeared to be starting to become a trend a concern to the Boks and Erasmus? The coach admitted that it was before the Kings Park game, but he feels it is less so now as while the Boks didn’t pile on the points in that period, Wales weren’t allowed to threaten either. England and Scotland were.
That though is where we are as South African rugby followers. What might have been seen as nit-picking before is being magnified because, quite frankly, the Bok games, and for that matter the Junior Bok games, have started to become a bit of a procession.
SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER THAN THEIR OPPONENTS
If you doubt that, consider this - the closest the Boks came to being matched over the past four weeks was the game at Loftus, where they fielded a very experimental team and the coach stuck to his experimental approach even when the Bok lead was under threat. Some individual mistakes led to Scotland coming back to threaten briefly, but the game was really wrapped up by the middle of the second half surge that took them in a 35-14 lead. Even with those late missed tackles, they won by 14 points. The closest the Junior Boks came to losing was actually in the final. Where they won by 11 points. But even then that was a gross misrepresentation of the superiority of the winners. They had three tries chalked off and some of those were ridiculous decisions, particularly the excellent try scored by Yaqeen Ahmed where he was adjudged to have jumped over a tackle that was actually a grass-cutter.
The Junior Boks were significantly better than all their opponents and that was without their initially selected captain, the help of Moyo and the influential fullback Luan Giliomee, who had his red card copped in the semifinal overturned but not in time for him to play a role in the decider.
Talking of Ahmed, he was given a mention by Erasmus in the Kings Park post-match press conference. The coach said he would have been with the Boks if it were not for the fact that the world championship coincided with this initial stage of the Bok season and he would have felt it unfair on Junior Bok coach Kevin Foote to take another key player away from him.
DE VILLIERS’ PERFORMANCES GIVE RASSIE A PLEASING HEADACHE
Ahmed is only 19 and looks a dazzling talent who will surely feature sooner rather than later for the Stormers and who is in many ways a doppelganger for Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu. Ah, mention of Sacha reminds us he wasn’t there for these initial three Bok matches. Neither were Eben Etzebeth, Lood de Jager, Siya Kolisi and others.
And yet the loss of those experienced players was hardly felt, and instead others stepped into the breach, led by Paul de Villiers, the openside flank who is way too complete a player to be compared to the ace Bok ball scavenger Heinrich Brussow like he has been. There is so much to De Villiers’ game and Erasmus faces a quandary when Kolisi returns. You can’t leave out the captain, but at the same time how do you leave out the man of the match from the Welsh game.
He’d only played a bit part for the Boks before but Cobus Wiese showed in his two appearances that he does have the work rate and the rampaging presence that could off-set the absence of Etzebeth if that is the case in the bigger games that lie ahead.
Two experienced campaigners making their debuts, tighthead prop Carlu Sadie and lock Ruben van Heerden, made strong debuts against Wales. Sadie was part of a frighteningly dominant scrum while under his lead the Boks did not lose a single lineout ball against the throw at Kings Park.
And yet, such is the depth available to the Boks, that it wouldn’t be a surprise were one or both of them to be missing when the squad assembles a week from now for the next phase of the season - the eagerly awaited Greatest Rivalry Series against the All Blacks and the warmup international against Argentina in Buenos Aires on 8 August.
Springbok Nations Championship results
SA 45 England 21
SA 42 Scotland 28
SA 43 Wales 0