Twelve visits, one try
Nick Mallett kept coming back to one number. South Africa reached the All Blacks’ 22 somewhere between ten and twelve times inside the first fifty minutes at Ellis Park. They scored once. New Zealand crossed five times and won 33-16, and for the former Springboks head coach that gap between territory and points is the entire match.
“You don’t want to say you take positives out of a game where you concede five tries, but the big problem for me is they are devastating on attack,” Mallett said today on SuperSport’s Final Whistle Presents Side Entry show. “They can sense an opportunity, and they generally take it. The problem we had was our inability to take the opportunities. Take the opportunities, and it’s a different game.”
His read on the rest was less bleak than the scoreline suggests. Urgency was there. The defensive physicality was there. The scrum held up and, first throw aside, so did the lineout. What went missing was the finishing.
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The arithmetic of Saturday
Cape Town is a second Test that behaves like a decider. South Africa trail 1-0 in Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry, and a defeat at the weekend kills the series outright: from 2-0 down, the most they can salvage across the four matches is a share of it.
Mallett will not have that from a side that has won the last two World Cups.
“There’s absolutely no way we can lose because, you know, 2-0, we can only draw the series, and that’s unacceptable,” he said. “The frustration of Saturday has got to really burn inside them the whole week.”
A squad audit a year out from the World Cup
Underneath the series maths sits a selection question. The 2027 World Cup is twelve months away, and the group that beat New Zealand in the Paris final has thinned. Bongi Mbonambi, Vincent Koch, Makazole Mapimpi and Faf de Klerk have all drifted down the order since Rassie Erasmus took the head coaching job back from Jacques Nienaber and started handing out caps to new names.
Mallett thinks Saturday will settle several of those cases.
“This will be the test. Listen, this is going to be the test for a number of players. It’s one year out from the World Cup again; a lot of them still want to go to the World Cup,” he said. “You’re playing the best team in the world now; they jumped ahead of us. You’re playing a very, very good team four times in a row, and you have to show your personality and your character. If we don’t, then Rassie has players that can step up.”
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