The best hooker in the country

He is the best hooker in the country. When I heard those words while eating oysters at the Knysna Festival on Sunday afternoon, I assumed the conversation was rugby and that it was about John Smit or Bismarck du Plessis.

But a bit of eavesdropping told me that the man in question was in fact Proteas batsman Neil McKenzie, who was busy dispatching a succession of short balls from the England bowlers as he and Graeme Smith set about their great comeback in the second innings at Lord's.

Watching the England bowlers persist with the short balls against a player who hardly ever gets it wrong when he goes on the hook or pull got me thinking about the Springboks, and their great droughtbreaking win over the All Blacks in Dunedin the day before.

It was a victory that took everyone by surprise, but in retrospect it shouldn’t have done. I had installed the Boks as favourites when I previewed the previous test match in Wellington, a prediction based on my view that the All Blacks are in a rebuilding phase and should have been ripe for the taking – and once Ali Williams left the field in the first half in Dunedin, the Kiwis looked distinctly like a second string combination.

That the view of New Zealand vulnerability swung around last week was because of the tactical and selection naeivity that was exposed in Wellington. The Boks in that match were a bit like the England bowlers, dishing up a diet of deliveries that the man they were bowling to would have been hoping for. In that sense it was not dissimilar to the second test against Wales, when the Boks also adopted the one strategy, not completely unlike touch rugby, that played into Welsh hands.

I am assuming that the England bowlers, once they see more of McKenzie, will start desisting from bowling short balls to him. They will learn from experience. And that is what the Boks did this last week, with the coach, Peter de Villiers, admitting during the week that he had got it horribly wrong in Wellington by not making better wet weather selections and employing a strategy for the conditions.

It is a bit concerning that he could have got such an elementary thing wrong, but now that the Boks have tasted the heady delight of a first victory on New Zealand soil in ten years, hopefully their coach will now recognise the value of retaining the elements that helped the Springboks win the World Cup just eight months ago.

It is not a coincidence that the two decent Bok performances of the season so far, in Bloemfontein in the first test against Wales and the Dunedin match, have come in games where they placed a much greater emphasis on structure and played to the big strength of this team, which is their physicality.

That is not to say that the Boks should mark time over the next four years, and those who think that the previous era was just about boring rugby suffer from memory loss. The previous coach spoke about the need to take the game to the next level on the eve of his last test against Wales in Cardiff, and afterwards he told us that many elements of that five-try triumph had been things that had been worked on during the World Cup in training but which just never came through during the match.

To win the next World Cup in 2011 it goes without saying that the Boks need to take their game forward, and they do have the players to do it, but right now they need to stick largely with what they know.

Should they do that, there is no reason why they should not win the Tri-Nations, which is what you should expect them to do if you consider that of the three Tri-Nations teams, the Boks are the ones that have the most players still available from last year.

Percy Montgomery made a big difference in Dunedin, not just with his field kicking, which was the biggest string to his bow, but with the calmness he brought onto the field with him and which spread to those around him. The Boks were a lot less harem scarem than they had been the week before, and the inclusion of World Cup Springboks contributed to the greater control they exhibited.

It is also not a coincidence that the Bok scrumming improved so significantly. This was the first time since De Villiers took over that the Boks retained the same front row from the previous week (Bismarck du Plessis played the second half in Wellington as a replacement for John Smit), and everyone knows how important it is to keep combinations together.

Well, until this past week everyone knew it outside of the Boks coach. Now that the penny has dropped, let’s hope the South Africans will build further on their win and spoil Robbie Deans’s first really big test match in charge of Australia. It was a great feeling seeing all those boring old arguments about the Boks not being worthy world champions put to rest – for good.