Its strong words from Mallet indeed. I tend to agree with him, but people should not get ahead of themselves. Let's play NZ and see how it goes. Depending on how it goes we can start making some assumptions regarding firstly the SA vs NZ No1 debate, as well as the recent debate about our "Boring" playstyle, as opposed to the NZ one which is supposedly the Answer to the survival of Rugby.
I have a few observations about the whole saga.
1. The SA fans jumping on this ridiculous bandwagon are the clear fairweather fans who burn their jerseys the first time we lose.
2. This playstyle debate is nonsense. People saying our style of rugby is boring is A: jealous and B: does not understand tactical rugby.
3. NZ media has been very critical of SA, this will butter the toast of their fans. But it does either reek of complacency or they don't know what's coming. I am convinced that New Zealanders are writing off the Springboks because they won the last game at the World Cup between the two countries, you are only as good as your last game and what good is a world cup if we (NZ) beat you (SA) in our last game, according to the NZ mindset.
On this fallacy of a perceived "boring" style of rugby. What is it that constitutes exciting rugby that is different from What SA is doing currently? Is NZ doing this?
This is how I see our style of Rugby.
Any game of rugby is ultimately to do what you can to beat the opposition. The idea is to play our ball in hand rugby when we are in the opposition half. If we are in our half then use the kicking aspect of rugby to gain a tactical advantage, don't run it from your half because it represents a bigger statistical risk against the top tier of team, as their defence will force errors in your half. So rather Make them play with the ball in their half than you can make them force errors in their own half. If you can have the best rush defence to supplement this, it works out well, but even without it makes sense.
If the opposition team is proficient with the ball in hand, they might penetrate the defence, such as what one might believe the All Blacks represent. Therefore, kicking to them is also a big risk. In such a case you need to make sure that when you go the kicking out of our own half route that we have the defence to back this up. Once we are in the opposition half our potent back will give any team in the world a good run. Great teams will not allow us many opportunities in their half therefore the perception that we play Boring Rugby is to a large degree forced upon by the other teams.
Against a minnow nation, we will mostly be in their half and will mostly as a result play aggressive attacking rugby. The conservatism is a direct result from the threat the top opposition poses. If we choose to engage them in such a game we need to make sure we can be better than them at it if they try and do the same thing. The forward dominance aspect comes into play here... Which team dictates?
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