The Springboks in their five home Test matches in 2022 score an underwhelming C. It is a pass mark, but an underachievement for a squad as talented as the 2019 World Cup winners.
If ever there should have been an expectation of five wins from five home games for the Springboks, it was in 2022.
That Jacques Nienaber’s Springboks delivered three wins from five was particularly disappointing and consistent with the hit-and-miss returns we have seen from the Springboks since Rassie Erasmus and Nienaber assumed responsibility for the Springboks in 2018.
The retort to any criticism of Nienaber and Erasmus is that they won the World Cup and finished the British & Irish Lions series as winners, albeit in the most dramatic fashion, through Morne Steyn’s 79th minute penalty in the third and final Test at the DHL Stadium in Cape Town.
Another is that on several occasions the Boks have lost to a late score, with the historic Welsh win in Bloemfontein the most damning of those defeats.
Erasmus spoke with great conviction after the 2019 World Cup that the Springboks success had to be measured through a winning consistency and, on this score, the past two seasons have been anything but successful.
There was the outstanding 27-9 win against the British & Irish Lions in the second Test and the final 30 minutes in the win against the All Blacks in Brisbane in 2021. Those were performances that screamed world champions.
In between, there was the disaster of successive Test defeats against the Wallabies in Australia and a first-up defeat against the All Blacks in Brisbane.
There was also the failure to beat a youthful England at Twickenham in their 2021 final Test.
I felt this season would be definitive of the Springboks’ dominance. The playing schedule against Wales favoured the Boks, with the first two Tests at altitude and played to capacity crowds. The Boks were poor in Pretoria in the first half, saved face in the second and never got out of second gear with a revamped team for the second Test in Bloemfontein.
The Welsh decider in Cape Town produced a performance consistent with the tag “best in the world”, as did the opening Test in Nelspruit against the All Blacks, which was the Boks’ most complete display since the 2019 World Cup final win against England.
It is not that they are mentally weak and cannot play the big occasion
Nelspruit encapsulated everything beautiful about these World Cup-winning Springboks but a week later at Ellis Park we once again witnessed everything that mentally is vulnerable about the very same players.
It is not that they are mentally weak and cannot play the big occasion. It is more a case of their failure to consistently play the occasion when it is taken as a given that they are mentally capable of doing so.
The Boks can get up for any one-off match, which always makes them a World Cup-winning contender, but 10 wins from 17 for Nienaber against Tier One opposition and 7 from 14 for Erasmus in 2018, shows how often they are incapable of sustaining this once-off excellence.
This was the season I expected it all to change. The squad had been together for five years and there was an exciting mix of experience and youthful talent that had emerged from the United Rugby Championship.
Wales had never won a Test in SA and the All Blacks, beaten at home in a series by Ireland for the first time in history, had never been more vulnerable.
The script should have read five Bok wins from five starts.
The world champions should have made a collective statement as telling and convincing as we saw individually from Malcolm Marx in Nelspruit and Lukhanyo Am in Johannesburg
But they didn’t.
Their report card read C when it should have read A-plus.
• Mark Keohane is the founder of keo.co.za, a multiple award-winning sports writer and the digital content director at Highbury Media. Twitter: @mark_keohane
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