Boks face fascinating choice between Pollard and Libbok

POLLARD V LIBBOK: Pollard had been called into the squad for the injured Malcolm Marx after two opening games against Scotland and Romania marred by errant goal-kicking from Mannie Libbok, Faf de Klerk and Damian Willemse.

Rassie Erasmus had implored people not to think of Handre Pollard as some kind of Superman but the attempt to defuse the expectations on the Leicester Tigers out-half were of little use as he stood over the tee shortly after 9pm on Sunday night.

Pollard had been called into the squad for the injured Malcolm Marx after two opening games against Scotland and Romania marred by errant goal-kicking from Mannie Libbok, Faf de Klerk and Damian Willemse. How bad was it? The Boks had the worst goal-kicking stats in the whole tournament.

Concern turned the corner into alarm when they conspired to miss four more in the epic loss to Ireland. And so enter Pollard: the white knight whose dead-eye contribution had done so much to get them over the line in 2019 and, after 14 months ruined by injury, was now starting ten against Tonga at the weekend.

The game was just over five minutes gone when scrum-half Cobus Reinach scooted over from a quick tap against an opposition caught napping. The gap left for him in the corner was a chasm in Test terms but not one that allowed him touch down all that far removed from the touchline.

Pollard had a tricky conversion and he knew all eyes were on him.

“We joked in the week about it: my first kick is probably going to be in the corner and it was! You follow your normal routine, you do your thing,” said the player who managed 50 minutes on top of the 30 played for Leicester a few weeks back.

Head coach Jacques Nienaber was coy enough at first about heaping praise on his returning hero. It was understandable given his constant backing of Libbok until now and the need to continue supporting a talented out-half who has endured considerable scrutiny.

Eventually, though, he relented with a quick take of Pollard’s game.

“He will just get better. He was solid. You look at his ball carries, that was decisive and good. If you look at his defence, I thought his level changed well and he put some proper shoulder hits in. I thought his off-the-ball work was good and his kicking game in general was good. The fundamentals, we wanted him to tick the boxes, I think he ticked [them].” 

Where the Boks go from here at No.10 will be fascinating.

Libbok remains relatively inexperienced at this level but there is a theory that he gets more out of a backline that all too often has to live off scraps as the forwards go about dominating opposing teams in the way generations of their predecessors did before them.

Do Erasmus and Nienaber start Libbok in a quarter-final with Pollard behind glass in case of emergency? Or can they afford even the tiniest sliver of doubt in knockout rugby when even one missed kick can prove to be fatal to a team’s tournament ambitions?

It’s a conundrum made all the more difficult by the fact that Libbok came on in the second-half against Tonga and nailed three kicks, two of them from challenging angles, but then this is a player who tends to be streaky in front of the posts.

He was sublime in splitting the woodwork in the warm-up demolition job on the All Blacks in Twickenham and it was no surprise to hear that he had worked assiduously on this area of his game in the week leading up to the game in Marseille.

Libbok felt he had been ‘falling off’ his kicks, which is why he was pulling them wide. It may be that the very presence of Pollard served to focus the mind and up his game, but the likelihood is that both will have parts to play from here on in.

What they are is the million dollar question.