Lions tour: Few sports teams play off momentum as well as Springboks
Forget about the off-field sideshows. That is all a distraction. The Lions should be far more concerned about what happened in the second half at Cape Town Stadium on Saturday night as they prepare this week for the third and decisive Test.
Conceding 21 unanswered points and convincingly beaten in every facet of the game after half-time, the Lions’ capitulation has given the Springboks momentum. Few sports teams play off momentum as well as the Boks.
The series is alive, which is all the Boks wanted after losing the first Test. A one-point victory would have been enough for them, but as it is, they delivered 40 minutes of rugby that mirrored their Rugby World Cup final effort in 2019. They crushed the Lions physically in the second half.
Did they also crush the Lions’ spirit?
The last time a series in South Africa needed the final Test to decide the outcome was in 1955. And the last time a Lions series went to the team losing the first Test was in 2001. The Springboks have no shortage of motivation to build on their suffocating second-half success on Saturday.
The Bomb Squad exploded from the bench and ratcheted up the intensity. Prop Trevor Nyakane was powerful and brutal and Lood de Jager arrived to take control of the lineouts. De Jager was quiet off the bench in the first Test —his first competitive match for more than three months.
In the second Test, however, he arrived midway through the second half, made a big tackle, and then pinched a Lions’ lineout within minutes of coming on. De Jager laid down a marker and finally introduced himself to the series in proper fashion, which is another huge boost for the home team looking ahead to the third Test.
South Africa also had to contend without star flanker Pieter-Steph du Toit for most of the match after he suffered a shoulder injury sustained in a questionable tackle early on. He is probably out of the third Test but that blow was softened by the confirmation yesterday that Duane Vermeulen is to rejoin the squad.
By the last quarter of the match, the Boks’ back row consisted of Kwagga Smith, Franco Mostert, and Marco van Staden. If someone had said that’s how it would look by the second Test, many would’ve raised the white flag.
But it was a testament to the Boks’ will and depth that the makeshift trio continued to dominate the breakdown after the excellent Siya Kolisi, No 8 Jasper Wiese, and the injured Du Toit were all withdrawn.
The Boks were always going to improve as the series wore on after their disjointed and almost non-existent build-up to the series. They lost the first Test after dominating the opening half of the series, but ominously they were far superior in the second 40 minutes of the second Test. How the Lions stop that momentum is their biggest challenge in the next seven days.
And they might have to prepare against the backdrop of citing issues after an alleged biting incident involving fullback Stuart Hogg, and lock Maro Itoje’s knee on Damian de Allende. South Africa have concerns of their own: wing Cheslin Kolbe may face further sanction for clumsily, rather than maliciously, taking scrum-half Conor Murray out in the air. Kolbe was yellow-carded for the incident but at the time of writing there was no confirmation of any citings.
Another ominous sign, and one that few would have noticed unless they were in the stadium, was the Boks’ reaction after the final whistle. There was no whooping for joy or celebrations. Most of the players didn’t even smile. There was just grim satisfaction. They were all business and had a steely look of a team that knows the job is not done.
Kolisi, who could join John Smit as a World Cup and Lions series-winning captain next week, revealed the Boks’ mentality after the match: “That was special. It was the toughest week I’ve ever had to face. But I’m grateful for the management we have. We stood up and that’s how I know us as a team.”
Kolisi continued: “We were calm during the week but when we trained, it was intense. We knew the mistakes we made last week and we improved that. We did what we had to do but it’s only the beginning. There is still one more game to go.”
Lions coach Warren Gatland mentioned Australia’s emotional effort to win the second Test eight years ago and level the series, and how it drained the Wallabies in the third test, which the Lions won at a canter to claim the spoils.
But these Boks are only starting to get into their work and, like the improvement they showed between Tests one and two, they will take it up another notch for the third. They are not emotionally exhausted — they are just getting their eyes in.
It was no secret that the world champions were completely underdone coming into the series, and they are still not as consistent as they were in 2019, but they are much better than they were two weeks ago.
While Rassie Erasmus was rattling cages with his dissection of the officialdom after the first Test, Nienaber was quietly preparing his team without distractions.
They sharpened up the areas in which they were beaten (aerial battle, lineout maul, and breakdown) and positively channelled anger and disappointment at the way they perceived themselves to have been treated by officials.
They have only conceded one try in the series and five in their last 10 Tests.
Despite some potential selection headaches, they are only going to improve.
The Lions need to find a way to cross the try line if they hope to win it from this position, but as the two previous arm-wrestles have shown, they might need to take risks to break the green wall.
And not all risks are rewarded.
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