It’s the boring Springboks that will beat the All Blacks

Many Springbok fans hate when this gets said but former coach Heyneke Meyer is right.

Throughout his tenure, he insisted South African rugby can’t afford to try and copy the All Blacks’ way of playing.

Also read: Springbok player ratings: Malcolm Marx almost achieves perfection

Meyer broadly based his reasoning on two factors.

Firstly, local players simply don’t have the type of attacking skill to consistently pull off such an ambitious game-plan.

That’s not necessarily the players’ fault, rather substandard coaching and the fact that South African rugby’s philosophy on rugby is inherently conservative.

Ironically, that conservative philosophy is actually exactly what makes the Springboks a strong international team.

There is no team in the world that can throw the All Blacks off their game quite like the Boks.

We saw it again on Saturday when they narrowly lost 24-25 at Newlands.

Allister Coetzee’s troops did nothing fancy in this game.

They merely made sure they were rock solid in the scrums and line-outs, while dominating the collisions.

The halfback pairing of Ross Cronje and Elton Jantjies bombed the All Blacks back three effectively to put them under pressure and Cronje’s try, which came after an incredible 18 phases, was down to nothing more than good ball retention.

The brilliant Malcolm Marx’s visit over the whitewash came from a maul.

See? It was simple, clinical rugby.

When Coetzee was asked afterwards if this “boring” way of playing was the way to go, he had a good answer.

“That’s probably not the perfect formula but the positive for me is that we can move between keeping the ball and going direct with a good kicking game,” he said.

There were a lot of things still that the Springboks didn’t do all that well in this match.

They still missed 29 of their 147 tackles and only gained 435 running metres despite having 64% possession.

If South Africa are going pull off a game-plan that inherently suits them better, Jantjies and Cronje need to improve dramatically.

Their respective kicking games are weak and Jantjies’ decision-making, especially under pressure, undermines his excellent attacking instincts.

But, to me, there’s no doubt this is the way the Springboks need to play.

They won the 2007 World Cup and 2009 Tri-Nations with this style of play.

Even in the 2015 World Cup semifinal, they ran the All Blacks close 18-20.

People should stop complaining about the Springboks being boring – trying to run the ball from everywhere gets them nowhere as the 27-all draw against the Wallabies showed two weeks ago.

“What about skills then,” is the question one invariably gets after such a statement.

It has a simple answer.

Our skills development shouldn’t be about running like Damian McKenzie or passing like Sonny-Bill Williams.

When we talk about skills it’s about players having the judgement to execute the “boring” game-plan at 100%.

Skills are about making 90% of your tackles, making sure you score points when you’re on the counterattack and delivering good tactical kicking.

The perfect example of that is Jean-Luc du Preez’s try.

Handre Pollard made a brilliant mini-break, found Marx with a deft off-load and the hooker then timed his scoring pass perfectly.

That’s skill.

Heinz Schenk: Online Sports Editor.