This was an interesting Test based on the first 36 minutes of dominance by the Pumas who led 9-0. Then the Springboks got their running game on song and scored more than a point a minute: 63 unanswered points with nine tries to none racked up against the rapidly tiring but still game Pumas.
The Springboks, to their credit, kept to their running game even in the first half hour when the Pumas made strong tackles and contested the breakdown relentlessly to win turnover after turnover. With 10 players from their marvellous 2007 Rugby World Cup campaign and only one player from their home competition in Argentina, the Pumas looked like the tough, uncompromising side that finished third in the tournament.
If Juan Hernandez, the wonderful five-eights (arguably as good a player as Daniel Carter) had been playing the Pumas would have certainly scored a couple of tries during their period of dominance. But the stand-in five-eight, Felipe Contemponi, passed the ball only once in the first half and the break-outs were not capitalised on in the way they might have been.
Against this, Butch James passed the ball 18 times and kicked once in the first half. After half-time the expansive game by the Springboks exploded into some thrilling ensemble rugby. Coach Peter de Villiers has been criticised for strange selections and for bizarre comments made at press conferences. But he is to be applauded for encouraging the Springboks to be a more fluent, well-balanced and expansive team.
Outstanding for the Springboks were Pierre Spies who showed why he is going to be the next great name in world rugby. A new winger Jongi Nowke was impressive. Fourie du Preez came back to the side for the first time this year and immediately showed, with a strong run to score a try, that he is the best halfback in world rugby.
If the Springboks can bring some of this form into next week’s Test against the All Blacks, they should be very hard – if not impossible – to defeat. All over the field, even the scrum which hasn’t been too authoritative since Os Du Randt retired, the Springboks looked too powerful for the Pumas.
There was one other intriguing aspect to the Test, the refereeing of Wayne Barnes, the English referee who refused to penalise France in the second half of their 2007 RWC quarter-final at Cardiff.
Barnes pummelled the Springboks, in particular, with penalties. As I watched the Test I realised that although it was apparently being played under the ELVs that Barnes did not give one short-arm penalty in the Test. Victor Matfield thought that the ELVs were in play because they pulled down the Pumas driving mauls without penalties.
What is going on here? Did Barnes not fully understand the ELVs and the short-arm penalty option? Or were we seeing the Northern Hemisphere response to taking the short-arm penalties out of the game – and allowing it to be faster with quick play-ons? It did seem to me that Barnes was deliberately not allowing short-arm penalties by calling for a scrum when a ball did not come out of a ruck rather than giving the short-arm penalty to the tackling side.
It is also clear that for whatever reason, Paddy O’Brien is grooming Barnes to be the top referee in the 2011 RWC tournament in New Zealand.
Barnes has too many faults in his idea of the role of the referee, to my mind. He doesn’t manage a match in the manner of, say, Peter Marshall. He tries to control the match. He continually talks to the players, thanking them and so on if they do something he wants, rather like a head-master with a gang of unruly students.
W.G.Grace’s remark to an umpire who gave him out is applicable to Barnes’ annoying (and incorrect) refereeing style: ‘They’ve come to see me bat, not you umpire.’ Barnes needs to learn that he should be subservient to the players, managing the game if you will, but not being the focal point of the game to the extent of controlling all the events of play.
If Barnes is the favoured one by O’Brien and if his domineering and wrong approach in this Test is a true indication of how he will apply the ELVs (by not applying them), then the gains made by the ELVs will be surely lost.
Perhaps this is the point of the exercise. Hopefully not.
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