For more than 100 years a simple formula has driven South African Rugby . . . that huge and intimidating forward packs are the key to everything.
Go back to the teams that paraded forwards like Chris Koch or Hennie Muller, Mof Myburgh or Frik du Preez, Oz du Randt, Bakkies Botha or Victor Matfield, and there is no questioning the focus that has made South Africa for much of their history the world’s most formidable rugby nation.
Read the Official Test Program here!
Big is best, power is everything.
For much of that time, having flying wingers like Cheslin Kolbe or Kurt-Lee Arense in the team would have been pretty much unthinkable.
No matter how quick or imaginative they were, they just didn’t fit the image. Not big enough, not frightening enough. Arendse tips the scales at 80kgs., Kolbe even less at 70kgs.
Yet Kolbe and Arendse are lightning quick, are possessed of amazing footwork, and largely won the first Test against Ireland a few weeks back through a slashing try each that only very quick men would score.
Kolbe was a revelation in the 2019 Rugby World Cup for the Springboks, a remarkable try putting matters beyond doubt in the final against England.
He probably won them the 2023 title as well when he was quick enough to charge down a conversion attempt by the French fullback Thomas Ramos in the quarter-final that allowed the Boks a one-point win.
So what does The Rugby Championship now bring? Have South Africa changed enough to throw the ball to these two flyers? To rely on a couple of little guys to put the icing on the intimidating cake that their forwards have always been able to bake?
I first saw the Springboks play at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1956. At that time the Boks had a winger named Tom van Vollenhoven, who later made a considerable name for himself in English Rugby League. All the talk before the game was of van Vollenhoven and his try-scoring ability.
In the event that first Test, and the one that followed in Brisbane, were grinding affairs in which the Springboks relied almost exclusively on powering over the Australian forwards, and hardly used the ball at all. Two Tests gave them 9-0 victories in each.
In 1969 I toured with the Wallabies to South Africa . . . the last of the long, 26-game tours that occupied more than three months.
At that time the Springboks had a tight-head prop named Mof Myburgh, who looked to be about twice the weight of Australia’s loose head Jim Roxburgh.
At the first scrum in the opening Test on Ellis Park, the South Africans took the packs so low that Australia’s hooker Bruce Taafe was trying to hook the ball with his nose.
The crowd went wild. The Australian dirt-trackers in the stand couldn’t work out what all the commotion was about.
They scanned the crowd, assuming there was a brawl or some other distraction. Alas, the crowd simply was celebrating awesome forward power and the effect it had on a dominant scrum.
At that time Australia paid no real heed to scrummaging, seeing it only as a quick heel to get the backs running.
On that tour we ran into an old prop in Port Elizabeth who played back in the 1950s and had the unfortunate experience of breaking his neck in a scrum. It was the cervicle vertebrae that the hangman of those days relied on for a fatal result.
Our old prop cracked his, but just kept playing, under some discomfort it must be said, ruing only the fact that the injury caused him to lose a scrum against the head.
We also met with a former Springbok prop Andy McDonald, who ran a farm in Zambia and one day encountered a lion on his property.
He couldn’t outrun it so he stood his ground and wrestled it. He managed to keep its teeth away from him and in the end the lion gave up and left.
McDonald was dreadfully scarred . . . scars he was happy to show us. He required 480 stitches and lost one finger and half a thumb, but he lived to tell the tale.
Cheslin Kolbe or Kurt-Less Arense are unlikely to have such luck should either of them be required to wrestle a lion, but their body shape allows extreme speed, and it is how this is used that is having an enormous impact on South African Rugby.
When players like Arendse and Kolbe are scoring tries, the game offers so much more than modern try-scoring trends, like the dreaded rolling maul.
It is a fact that the game has evolved into a bit of an arm wrestle . . . a game of collision where it was once a game of evasion.
Forwards who used to be committed to close combat can now stretch defensively across the field, making the one-on-one backline contests that once provided abundant thrills harder to come by.
It takes special talents to overcome that, and South Africa’s wingers are certainly special talents.
It will be interesting to see how much scope they are given against a rebuilt Australian team.
The evolution of Rugby that has made the collision game the modern thing, requiring ever-bigger players most of the time, makes Kolbe and Arendse departures from the norm.
There is an added consciousness about such things since the gripping Sevens Rugby that was on such spectacular show at the Paris Olympics.
Sevens is all about evasion . . . about pace and space and running with the wind in the hair. Nice if we could get a bit of that back in our Test matches.
