Boks need a game of two halves

If the Springboks are to register a rare back-to-back victory over the All Blacks in Durban they will have to live up to one of the great sports commentators’ chestnuts and play a game of two halves at the Absa Stadium.

The Boks have not recorded successive home wins over the All Blacks since 1976 and what better time to do it than in John Smit’s record-setting Test as an international captain and Jean de Villiers and Bryan Habana’s 50th?

But to accomplish that, and also place and arm-lock on the Tri-Nations, the Boks will have to eradicate a second-half fade-out that has been evident in three of the four Tests they have played this year.

In the three matches against the Lions plus their Tri-Nations opener against the All Blacks the Boks have accumulated a record that shows that (on average) they ‘won’ the first half 12-10 and ‘lost’ the second 11-13.

The average scores are skewed by the lop-sided 9-28 defeat by the Lions in the third test at Coca-Cola Park but the fact is that in the first and third Lions tests as well as against the All Blacks the Boks were shaded in the second half.

The only Test in which the Boks performed strongly in the second half was in their series-clinching 28-25 victory over the Lions in the second Test at Loftus when they struck back from being 8-16 down at the break and scored 20 points to nine in the second half.

However the pattern of this Test was disturbed by the fact that Schalk Burger was yellow-carded in the 30th second. Burger’s dismissal, in his 50th Test, impacted on the Boks’ performance and they managed to fight back and clinch it late in the match – but you would have to be a fool not to concede that Jaque Fourie’s astounding late try could as easily have been disallowed and that it required a halfway line penalty by Morné Steyn (incidentally in the 54th minute of elapsed time in the second half) to clinch the win and with it the series.

There is little doubt that the Boks have an Achilles Heel and that is a fade-out in the third quarter of matches. There are numerous reasons for this – a lack of fitness?, injudicious substitutions, over-confidence, desperation on the part of opponents – but the fact is Smit and his men have allowed the intensity to dissipate and if they do the same against the ABs in Durban they will not again get away with it.

And I fear the team’s coaches – and I, almost alone among commentators, always use the plural and not the singular Peter de Villiers – may have got it wrong again with the bench they have named for the King’s Park Test.

Why on earth drop Ryan Kankowski from the reserves and replace him with Andries Bekker? The team already possesses the best lock combination in world rugby in Victor Matfield and Bakkies Botha and in Danie Rossouw they have the best lock substitute on the globe – in fact Rossouw would walk into the current All Black side.

So why would you need another lock? Kankowski, to my mind, would have been the ideal man to come in and lift the pace, rather than allow it to flag, in the period that the Boks have shown themselves to be vulnerable.

So… in this new world of online predictions it is my contention the Boks will not win this one. I sincerely hope I am wrong but my head tells me the All Blacks will play the more robust second half and will rain on John, Jean and Bryan’s parade.