The 2024 Rugby Championship came to an end on Saturday with the South African Springboks (Bokke) victorious in a complete routing of the Argentinian Los Pumas at Mbombela stadium in Nelspruit South Africa.
While the event highlights the SA squad’s world No1 ranking, there is a growing, although sometimes reluctant international acknowledgement that this springbok squad, led by the remarkable Siya Kolisi and trained by rugby boss genius Rassie Erasmus, may just be the best rugby squad the world has ever seen.
Looking beyond just the table and points lead of the Springboks, and taking a bit of a deeper delve into the team versus individual player’s statistics, paints a picture for the reasons for much of the team’s success ratio.
The most remarkable thing you find when you look at the final individual player statistics for the tournament, is that the Springbok players do not rank No1 in many of the individual “success rankings” such as number of individual tries scored, tackles made, successful kicks or in total points scored. New Zealand have players ranked No1 in three of these categories but scored 7% fewer points than the Springboks and had 33% less match points at the end of the tournament.
A lot of rugby supporters would expect that the SA squad, with their tough tight five forward pack and their replacement “bomb squad” would have been the game winner by winning more scrums and crushing the opponent forwards, bust also not the reality.
The Bokke in fact had the lowest percentage of scrums won for the tournament at 79% compared to 91% for New Zealand and 87% for both Argentina and Australia. In percentage tackles won, the Bokke are last in the rankings, and in tackles made they are also last with only 664 tackles made compared to over 900 for the other three teams each.
So where did the Bokke shine and what were the success factors for their historic win?
Well there is enough evidence to point towards a single success philosophy – moving forwards. Sounds a bit crazy at first but all the data would seem to indicate that this was their top winning formula.
Data does not lie so when you see that the number of meters gained for the Springboks was 13% more than their closest rival and that they kicked 20% more than the closest team and scored the most tries for the tournament and conceded the fewest points against them. It starts to paint a picture.
The Bokke players who had individual brilliance and top placings were concentrated in the line breaks and defenders beaten categories so also indicating that the philosophy of moving forward was always at play.
They had fewer tackles to make because they controlled ball possession and kept moving forwards. The large and very effective forwards pack was used to drive the ball forward with their rolling mauls and their backline players were effective in creating line breaks and beating defenders to score tries.
Time will tell if the genius of Erasmus or the team leadership of Kolisi will be passed on to the next generation of Springboks, but one thing is for sure that they will need to keep moving forward to keep winning.
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