Hansen watched the scrum and saw the whole story
Two missed tackles. That is where Sir Steve Hansen puts the third Test, and he is not especially interested in softening it.
The former All Blacks head coach spoke on the Rugby Unity podcast this morning about New Zealand’s defeat at the FNB Stadium, a game he rated highly before taking it apart. “A wonderful game of footy,” he said, then went straight at the detail. “The Springboks did what the Springboks do. Their scrum and maul were unstoppable, but two missed tackles on their midfielders by Leroy Carter, and that was 14 points or thereabouts, and that’s the game.”
Hansen, 67, pointed out how tight the series stayed. New Zealand took the opener at Ellis Park by the widest margin of the three, then lost in Cape Town and Soweto by seven points or fewer. “There’s not much in it, but you’ve got to make sure that you go for the whole 80 minutes, and if you don’t, you’re going to get second.”
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The scrum and the lineout, in that order
Dave Rennie’s side trailed by 12 entering the final quarter and barely threatened until the last play of the match. Hansen traces that back to where the ball comes from.
“You’re not going to beat the Boks until you can get parity at scrum time and you can get decent ball in the lineout,” he said. South Africa owned the scrum, and New Zealand answered the Springbok lineout defence by throwing short. “A lot of the time, we were having to go to the front, and it was messy or ugly, and you’re letting them get a free shot from the back with their defensive system the way it is.”
He gave Rennie a deadline rather than a verdict. “We’ve got until next year’s World Cup to get these things right, and I think we will. Once we do that, then we’re right on the hunt.”
Rennie has already picked his side of the argument
Speaking to media on Monday, Rennie said the All Blacks and World Rugby remain at odds over how scrums are being refereed. On the lineout he was blunter about the trade-off. “Ideally we’d like to play it off the middle or off the back, but the way South Africa were defending the middle and back, it’s free ball at the front. So we’re prepared to take it just to get the ball on our hands and get a bit of continuity.”
New Zealand and South Africa are on a collision course for a World Cup quarter-final in Australia. Hansen’s two problems have roughly twelve months left to run.
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