A player benched for kick-off
Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu starts on the bench on Sunday in Perth. Rassie Erasmus has torn up his side for this Test against Australia, making thirteen changes from the last outing. It is a sharp fall from the central role the 24-year-old fly-half played in the series win over New Zealand, four straight victories in which he pulled the strings for South Africa.
Among the back-to-back world champions, the battle for the No 10 shirt is brutal and any poor display gets punished fast. Nick Mallett, who coached the Springboks from 1997 to 2000, has highlighted two specific flaws in Feinberg-Mngomezulu’s game. His view carries weight, too: Mallett led South Africa to a record 17-match winning run at the end of the 1990s, something the nation had never seen before.
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A timing issue, not a talent issue
For Mallett, the ability is not the problem. “It’s not that he can’t do it. He can do all of those things. But is he doing them at the right time?” he said. The former coach has picked out two clear areas to fix: reading the quality of the ball at different stages of a match, and making the right call at the right moment for the players around him.
In plain terms, Mallett believes the fly-half is misreading situations. Knowing when to attack space and when to move the ball to a better-positioned teammate remains, in his view, the main lesson if he wants to take the next step.
A place on the bench does not erase the faith
The heavy rotation for the trip to Perth is also down to the need to manage a packed schedule after the series against the All Blacks. Mallett is sticking to his line: the skills are there. The question now is how many weeks on the bench Feinberg-Mngomezulu will need before he fixes what, for the moment, looks more like a problem with his internal clock.
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