Smit’s diesel engine is firing up

The All Blacks may have missed a trick by going out to win their opening Tri-Nations match against the Springboks.

Imagine the chaos there would be in South Africa if the Bok squad that went to New Zealand returned with an All Black scalp. Plans that had been in place for a long time would need to be reviewed and the media might now be writing up Adi Jacobs and Alistair Hargreaves as better World Cup prospects than Jaque Fourie or Victor Matfield.

But the All Blacks didn’t lie down and play dead, and thanks to their 40-7 win, the Boks were able to return to South Africa with the certainty that there isn’t too much outside of the group that trained in Rustenburg that can be added to the World Cup starting team.

The All Black win also meant the Boks were given some pointers on where the big threats will come should these two teams meet again in the World Cup semifinal. The All Blacks cannot claim the same about the Boks for they would have had to send spies to Rustenburg if they wanted a proper idea of what challenge they face when the real deal arrives.

Some readers have asked me whether the Boks will be prepared to show their hand once they start heading back towards full strength during the home leg. The answer to that is that there isn’t going to be a lot new to show – when I interviewed Rassie Erasmus for SA Rugby Magazine he said it would be crazy to completely change the Bok game-plan now, and he is right about that.

What we should expect after the Rustenburg camp is refinements to aspects of the Bok game rather than an overhaul. A lot of emphasis will have been placed on the breakdown and increasing the physicality and work-rate that is seen as a core element of the successful Stormers defensive system. Those are things that the overseas teams will probably anticipate – there is hardly any secret about it.

Obviously some thought will also have to go into attacking ploys, for too often the Boks looked bereft in this regard when they were overseas. But it is too late to make fundamental and all-encompassing changes now, and the Boks will see the suffocation or strangulation formula that won them the 2009 Tri-Nations as the core element of their challenge.

Where there should be a massive improvement now that the players have worked with Erasmus should be in the areas related to efficiency and in the finer tactical details. The defence should be back to what it was before last year's disasters.

So what did the away leg realise for the Boks? Very little in terms of adding depth to the challenge, which should surely have been one of the aims once it was decided the top players should rest. Full marks though to Bok coach Peter de Villiers for being honest enough to admit to what many of us have felt all along – more of an effort should have been put into the renewal process over the past four years than has been the case.

What the away leg confirmed was just how heavily reliant De Villiers now is on the leadership group that has remained intact from the previous World Cup. He only had one of those players with him in Australia and New Zealand in the form of World Cup captain John Smit, but Smit couldn’t do an effective job with a team that lacked the all-important experienced backbone.

Smit has been heavily criticised in recent weeks and any praise for his improvement between the Sydney test and the one in Wellington should be tempered by the fact that in the build-up to three of the six All Black tries, Smit missed crucial tackles.

Yet I would argue that Smit playing 160 minutes of rugby in consecutive matches was probably the only really big plus to emerge from the tour.

The reason Smit was in Australasia and not in Rustenburg was because apart from needing a leader on this under-strength tour, De Villiers also knows that what Smit needs more than anything else right now is game time. Three or four consecutive matches is normally what it takes to do the trick for Smit, and it was not coincidental that Smit’s best performance of 2010 was the rampaging game he produced in the final Tri-Nations test against Australia in Bloemfontein.

He is a long way from being the player he was four years ago, but there were signs in Wellington that, as was the case with Os du Randt during the White era, the playing time that has been afforded Smit has just started to ignite that old diesel engine.

Just how De Villiers will utilise Smit now that Bismarck du Plessis comes back into the mix is difficult to say. To my mind Du Plessis should always start. But if it is De Villiers’s intention to start with the captain in the key games, at least Smit’s two consecutive matches in Australasia enabled him to get some sort of momentum that hopefully he can build on in the home leg.