Were we occupying the same universe during the broadcast? Damian was much the same as he has always been, as was Kriel. Du Toit perhaps looks to have lost a yard or two, but otherwise I saw little that fundamentally altered my assessment of him.
What struck me more was how heavily the Boks still depended upon individual players to manufacture the result. There is an important distinction between possessing dangerous attacking players and possessing a functioning attack. Sacha has extraordinary potential, but I still think much of that talent is being wasted. In truth, our entire backline is being underutilised. Too often we rely upon someone like Sacha, Arendse or Willemse to create something from circumstances in which the system itself has created very little.
That is what makes the continued persistence with Damian and Kriel so difficult for me to understand. They can be accommodated within a successful side, certainly, but I've never regarded either as a genuinely high-quality specialist centre. We have Esterhuizen available, with plenty of rugby still ahead of him, while Am appears to have disappeared almost completely from the conversation. After all these years, I still regard Damian and Kriel largely as placeholders who happened to remain in place.
Despite my longstanding misgivings about Lead-Foot Lood, I'll give him his due here. He carried with enough power and purpose to provide the sort of steady gain-line possession we badly needed. There were periods when we struggled to make a meaningful breach in their half, and those carries at least allowed us to keep nudging the defence backwards rather than simply recycling static possession.
That remains one of my larger concerns with this Bok attack. Possession and phase count are not achievements in themselves. If we're taking six, eight or ten phases to generate the breach that a better attacking shape might create in three, every additional phase presents another opportunity for a handling error, breakdown penalty or defensive turnover. Against better organised defences, sterile possession eventually becomes a liability.
We need to become considerably more incisive. With Sacha, Arendse, Willemse, Esterhuizen and Morné van den Berg among the resources available, there is no good reason for South Africa to depend so heavily upon moments of individual invention. The structure should be creating the space for those players; the players shouldn't continually be rescuing the structure.
So no, the result hasn't suddenly transformed my assessment of the individuals we've spent years debating. It was an excellent Bok victory and there were performances deserving of considerable credit. But a 43-point scoreline shouldn't prevent us from asking how those points were produced, where the attack stalled, and whether this extraordinarily talented group is actually approaching its ceiling.
For me, it isn't — and that's precisely why I'm so demanding of it.
Edit — There was also a pivotal moment in the second half that shouldn't be lost beneath the final scoreline. An All Black was called offside at the ruck, kicked the ball ahead and was subsequently taken out by Morné. The original offside rendered everything that followed academic, but without it we could very easily have been looking at a penalty try and a card, potentially a red. From that point onwards we would have been playing an entirely different Test.
