Springboks have to sort out inconsistency ahead of World Cup

The one major disappointment of Jacques Nienaber’s reign as Springbok coach has been the rank inconsistency that has plagued the national team over the past three years.

Every weekend you can never be sure which Bok team will pitch up on the day and the inconsistency reared its ugly head again on Saturday when they fell to a 35-20 defeat against the All Blacks in Auckland in the Rugby Championship.

This came just a week after a superb start to the international season as they hammered the Wallabies 43-12 at Loftus Versfeld, to get their campaign off to the perfect start.

Lions series

If we look back to the Boks’ 2021 season, still in the midst of the Covid pandemic, many Bok players had not played as much rugby as they would have liked, especially on the international front as they missed the whole 2020 season.

Going into the international season that started with the British and Lions series, they could have been forgiven for going in undercooked. However, they surprised many by winning the series 2-1, despite losing the opening match, to get Nienaber’s reign off to a strong start.

Two big wins over Argentina then followed at the start of the Rugby Championship as things looked to be going swimmingly, only for the curse of inconsistency to kick in over the rest of the season.

Three losses in a row, two against the Wallabies Down Under and one against the All Blacks followed, before a win against New Zealand in the final game saw them finish third in the competition.

The end-of-year-tour then saw the Boks battle to a win over Wales, comfortably beat Scotland and then slip to a tight defeat against England in another inconsistent showing.

2022

The 2022 season was more of the same, as the Boks won their incoming tour against Wales 2-1, with a tight opening win followed by a tight loss in the second game with a second-string team, before a thumping win in the third match.

The Rugby Championship followed a similar pattern to the previous season, except backwards, with a win over a struggling All Blacks at Mbombela, followed by a bitterly disappointing defeat against the same opponents at Ellis Park a week later.

A loss against the Wallabies followed, before a strong finish of three straight wins, one against Australia and two against Argentina ended with a second place finish in the competition.

Another up and down end-of-year-tour followed with losses against Ireland and France, offset by impressive wins over Italy and England.

The Boks have now started 2023 in a similar way to the past two international seasons, with massive inconsistency and this is something they have to fix heading into the World Cup, with them having four games to remedy it over the coming month and a half.