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Tom Hamilton, Senior Writer
PARIS, France — After seven weeks of tries and tribulations and grand hopes of a new winner on the Rugby World Cup, we’ve gone full circle back to the two southern hemisphere powerhouses. Those days of French optimism and the sea of Irish green all willing their teams to a maiden final seem eons ago. Instead it’s back to the two staples: New Zealand and South Africa, who have won six of the nine World Cups to date.
It’s a fixture encased in inescapable nostalgia. There will be echoes of that famous 1995 final: Jonah Lomu, Joel Stranksy’s drop-goal, Nelson Mandela handing the trophy to Francois Pienaar. The Rainbow Nation. Back then when the game was on the verge of going professional. A bright future.
Yet here we are 28 years later with the game facing numerous challenges both on and off the pitch. It’s been a week where they’ve tried to map out the future of the sport, but questions and uncertainties remain. One of the few constants, though, has been the guarantee that whenever the Springboks meet the All Blacks, it delivers.
Both have the rarest ability of being able to ignore noise, and just carry on in their own lane, trusting the processes and collective knowledge from the past and present to reach the pinnacle of sport. But in a sport where you’re so used to hearing players attempt to downplay the significance of occasions through their professional gaze, this one is different. The magnitude transcends it.
“It’s huge,” Springboks captain Siya Kolisi said. “We’ve prepared as hard as we can. We know what to expect. I don’t think as a player it will ever get any bigger.”
Kolisi was just four years old when the Springboks won in 1995. When they triumphed in 2007 with John Smit lifting the trophy in the Stade de France, he was 18 and played for the Cheetahs, but went on to the Western Province academy. It was there he met Rassie Erasmus and Jacques Nienaber for the first time. That trio masterminded the Boks 2019 triumph and has steered them to within one game of winning a historic fourth title.
The World Cup journey is always about making the next Monday significant. Lose and you head home, Monday is just another day. Win? Monday is the start of the build up to the next match. It’s been a driving force behind both the All Blacks and Springboks, but Saturday’s Test is the end point, both for those players at the end of their Test careers, but also this group of Boks. Nienaber will join Leinster after the World Cup, Erasmus’ contract is up in 2025, while several of this squad are the wrong side of 30.
But despite the familiarity of this group – 10 of the starting 15 were in the XV for the final against England in Yokohama four years ago — there’s never any complacency. It’s been the World Cup of Erasmus’ traffic lights, opting to scrum off marks, and of course the 7-1 split.
The Springbok players found out the team on Monday. For 10 of their squad, their World Cup was over. That number included Manie Libbok, their first-choice fly-half through the tournament, who was hooked after 30 minutes against England. Libbok out of the 23, Handre Pollard in at fly-half, Faf de Klerk alongside him.
The team was made public on Thursday. Just five minutes before the Springboks confirmed their squad at 8.45am in a small village hall 20 kilometres north of Paris, World Rugby announced the decision to drop the investigation into claims Tom Curry was subject to an alleged racial slur from Boks hooker Bongi Mbonambi in the semifinal. Nienaber said it hadn’t been a distraction for the team. “Where we stay we are almost in our own bubble,” Nienaber said. “For us it was business as usual and we focused on rugby and that was taken care of in the background.”
Within that bubble they’d been plotting all week with the 7-1 split the chief call. They opted for this mix of replacements against Ireland in the pool stage, top-loading the bench with forwards, trusting their backs to go 80 minutes, all aided by the astonishing versatility of Kwagga Smith.
But even the decision to go with that split wasn’t quite the full story. There was no dedicated scrum-half replacement named, with the management opting for Willie le Roux as the sole specialist back among the eight. The message was clear: this is going to be attritional and decided in the forwards. “World Cup finals are not necessarily the most spectacular affairs,” Nienaber said. “If you look at past games it is always tight and this one is going to be tight. It’s going to be a grind.”
The Springboks are rightly proud of their “bomb squad”, the batch of forwards they deploy to turn the momentum of a match back in their favour. It worked spectacularly well in the 2019 World Cup, and it’s delivered here again, as both France and England found to their cost in the knockouts. But if the Boks have their “bomb squad”, New Zealand have their own group of willing replacements: “Easy Company”, taking inspiration the story of the 101st Airborne Division in World War II.
The All Blacks have been watching television series “Band of Brothers” at their hotel on the west of Paris. There’s a feeling that perhaps the All Blacks have slipped under the radar here at the World Cup. They opened their campaign with a comprehensive defeat to France. But since then they’ve built in the shadows, and by the time the knockouts ticked around, they unleashed a flurry of emotion and intensity on Ireland to edge the favourites out 28-24, and then obliterated Argentina in the semifinal 44-6.
All this just a year or so after the New Zealand Herald ran a front page editorial on August 7, 2022, titled: “Ian Foster and the All Blacks: It’s time for change.” That ran a day after the All Blacks lost to South Africa 26-10 in Mbombela, their sixth defeat in eight matches equalling their worst ever run. Six days later, the All Blacks defeated the Springboks 35-22 at Ellis Park, and Foster kept his job.
The criticism was brutal. It angered former All Blacks like Tana Umaga. The current group did their best to shield themselves from the flack, but captain Sam Cane took the brunt of it. Changes behind the scenes happened, the All Blacks coaching team evolved with personnel shifted around and on Thursday, Foster was talking at the Paris Country Club having just confirmed his team for the final. It’s a funny old sport. He was asked to reflect on his turbulent year. “I’ve just started to get my back nice and straight from last year and now you’re trying to make me hunched over again! It’s the life of this business, it’s a tough game,” Foster said. “It’s tough when you’re trying to get your performance right.”
The All Blacks have had former players into camp this week, like double World Cup-winning captain Richie McCaw and legendary fly-half Dan Carter. They know what it takes to win the sport’s biggest prize, as does Sam Whitelock who is 80 minutes away from becoming the first player in history to win three World Cups.
Whitelock is named on the All Blacks’ bench, with Brodie Retallick starting. There were reports star fly-half Richie Mo’unga was nursing an injury but when the team was released, there he was with the No.10 next to his name. They made just one change to the starting line-up and another to the bench. None of this 7-1 split talk or switching half-backs, they just tweaked what’s served them so well.
Saturday will be several of this group’s final match in an All Blacks jersey. World Cups and how they fit into the sport have a habit of retiring players. They’re the quadrennial target for those towards the end of their Test careers, looking to eke out one last ruck, maul or tackle through bruised bodies and battered knees.
While some of the group are heading off on short-term sabbaticals overseas, for scrum-half Aaron Smith, it’s his final Test with the All Blacks. “We know it’s the last game for a number of iconic players, but that’s the case for both teams,” Foster said. “But the occasion in front of us is so exciting and we don’t want to think about post-game.[Smith] has prepared well, he is excited, he needs a tap on the head sometimes when he gets too excited, but he is in a good place.”
But there’s no place for sentimentality when it comes to finals. Just ask Dane Coles who’s retiring from the sport after this tournament, but was omitted from the matchday squad for Saturday’s match. “Yeah, tough. We don’t want to talk too much about post-game stuff, but that was a tough one, probably the toughest I have had as a coach,” Foster said. “He took it the way I expected him to. He’s a champion.”
It’s been yet another huge call Foster’s had to make with his fellow selectors, but he’ll be trusting what’s served them so well this tournament. Once the dust has settled on Saturday’s final, Foster will head back to New Zealand. “I’m looking forward to going home and mowing the lawn,” he said. But before he can get out the grass clippers, a World Cup is on the line and the number one and two ranked teams in the world are vying for the biggest prize in rugby.
The sport has had a tough few years. The future is still uncertain, it’s hardly on stable ground . But on Saturday, for 80 minutes, you’ll have the innovative Boks against the quietly confident All Blacks. Both teams will be driven by thoughts of the impact a triumph would have on their country back home if they win. “I don’t think it will happen in our lifetime again to have two teams like this,” Kolisi said. “When we win, South Africa wins. It doesn’t say this guy started or this guy kicked the winning penalty. When they write the name on the trophy they say South Africa.”
For the All Blacks, this is a chance to reassert their dominance on the sport. “Make no mistake about it, we are here representing New Zealand,” Retallick said. “We don’t quite have the population [size of South Africa] but we have seen the support coming from home, and across the social media channels how excited people are and we’ve got a lot of messages over the last couple of weeks. We’re here to represent the country, the jersey and ourselves as individuals and the team.”
Saturday will be the latest and hopefully greatest edition of these two sides meeting. New Zealand-South Africa is a match which cannot help but quicken the pulse. There will be echoes of yesteryear, memories drifting back to the great meetings between the two sides, and 1995 will be unavoidable. But these two are ready to write the next chapter in this epic rivalry.
“We’ve got two teams that are the old, old foes playing each other, and we all remember the last one they played against each other in the final in 1995,” Foster said. “That was an epic, and everyone’s hoping this will be the same.”