STRIKING IT RICH: So what advantage is there for the Boks being No 1?

SEEDINGS ARE MEANINGLESS

There was so much talk during the year of the need for the Springboks to maintain their No 1 position on the World Rugby rankings until the end of the international season, but after the draw was made for the Rugby World Cup in Australia it all came across as much ado about nothing.

Obviously it is good to be the No 1 team in the world anyway, but the whole angle that it would help the South Africans when it came to the draw for 2027 it is hard now to see what advantage there was for them.

As it turns out, the teams that finished third and fourth on the rankings appear to have been more advantaged, England and Ireland, with the most likely route for both of them being one that avoids the top two, South Africa and Ireland. Whereas the Boks and New Zealand face a probable quarterfinal and the winner of that game will face dangerous France.

All set for Rugby World Cup 2027 🏆

🇿🇦 The Springboks have been grouped with Italy, Georgia and Romania

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe have been grouped with England, Wales and Tonga#SSRugby | #RWC2027 pic.twitter.com/JvZIDA5JtQ — SuperSport Rugby (@SSRugby) December 3, 2025

So what am I not understanding here? Am I stupid to think that if you have a seeding system, which presumably is what the world rankings are, the first thing you do is make sure that the No 1 team and the No 2 team are on opposite sides of the draw. Meaning they don’t meet each other until a possible final.

That famous Wimbledon final between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe in 1980 would not be remembered as it is all these years later if, instead of meeting in the last game of the tournament, the two top seeds had met in the quarterfinal. Come to think of it, and with all respect to the Kiwis, the Bok final in the 2023 World Cup, and certainly their most memorable and fast paced play-off game, was the quarterfinal against France.

It shouldn’t be like that, and World Rugby has effectively repeated the mistake they made in 2023, where the top teams, meaning the Boks, All Blacks, France and Ireland, were all in the same side of the draw and cancelled each other out whereas a very mediocre England team effectively had a free passage to the semifinal round.

No 1 playing No 2 in the quarterfinal round makes no sense on any level and it does make all the talk about the quest for No 1 appear to have been an exercise in irrelevance. The mission need only to have been to be in the top six, which is something the Boks could have done blindfolded.

DRAW SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN SO EARLY

So when is the draw for the FIFA World Cup being done? It will take tomorrow (Friday), 5 December. And when is the World Cup taking place? It starts on 11 June next year, in other words little over six months away.

If FIFA, who preside over a tournament that features far more teams than a Rugby World Cup and certainly includes more nations capable of winning it, can do their draw just six months prior to kick-off, why can’t World Rugby do the same?

Reading through some of the analysis that followed the rugby draw on Wednesday it struck me that there was a lot of assumption of what the world order would look like when the World Cup in Australia arrives. But that’s assuming a lot. For instance, while England are improving, who is to say they will still be better than France when 2027 arrives.

The French were a bit off in the recent Autumn Series but they will get Antoine Dupont back one of these days. My money still says that, because of their impressive depth, which might only be surpassed by South Africa, they will be the biggest challengers to the Boks in 2027. They are the reigning European champions because they won the last edition of the Six Nations and no-one should bet their house that they won’t win it again between now and the RWC.

There’s also the Nations Cup that will kick off next year too. If it is South Africa and France who end as the best teams in their respective hemispheres and end up playing in the final, the rankings/seeding as they were at Wednesday’s draw could look stupid. The tournament is two years away. The draw should have been done nearer the time.

VALUE OF RASSIE’S SELECTION POLICY UNDERLINED

“They are going to have to play New Zealand and France first if they make the final, they will be knackered before they get to that final”. That would have been a common opinion spreading through the vines of social media after the draw. Yet it is possible the Boks won’t be so knackered.

For while it is true that if you have the same players front New Zealand one week and then France the next before playing in a final could risk the players arriving at the decider having played themselves off their feet, the Boks don’t necessarily need to do that. No nation is capable of rotating and still winning top games like South Africa is, and most of that is down to the success Bok coach Rassie Erasmus has enjoyed in his quest to spread the selection net and build depth.

He admitted recently that he may have made a mistake when he selected the same team that had won the epic 2023 quarterfinal against the host nation for the semifinal against England, and that could be an indicator of what he has planned for rugby’s next global showpiece tournament.

Meaning that the team that plays in the final may turn out to be the team that played in the quarterfinal against New Zealand, and not the semifinal against France. That would mean a two week break for those players, and they’d certainly be fresher than whoever they play in the final as there is no other nation capable of rotating like South Africa can.

Of course it is unlikely that Erasmus would go with two completely separate teams. But they could be teams featuring a lot of changes in the interests of keeping the players fit. Risky? Maybe, but then Rassie has never been afraid of risk. And what he tries usually works.

BAD OMEN

Regardless of who the Boks were going to draw in their quarterfinal, that stage of the 2027 tournament is going to be one fraught with nerves and tension not only for the Bok players and coaches but also the fans. The quarterfinal stage is arguably the most testing point of a World Cup for any team, certainly if you are talking top team, as no-one wants to bomb out of the World Cup two weeks from the end.

I will never forget the funereal looks on the faces of the Bok players when I spotted them boarding a bus at their team hotel just a matter of hours after they had made their quarterfinal exit to Australia in Wellington in the 2011 edition of the competition. They were heading to the airport for the flight home, with it being one of the conditions of the tournament that teams make their departure as soon as possible after their exit.

At least if you get to the semifinal and lose there is a third/fourth playoff game, or Bronze Final if you like, to keep you on site and to keep your fans engaged. You can argue, as some of us did in 2015, when the Boks finished third, and also in 1999, when they had the same result, that the tournament was relatively successful and not a complete failure. When you go out at the quarterfinal stage you are a failure and you also leave behind many incensed fans who paid a lot of money to come and support you.

The faces of some mates who arrived in New Zealand to watch the Boks the day after the Boks had started their flights home were almost as sombre as the faces of the Boks as they boarded that bus.

Fortunately the Boks haven’t exited often at the quarterfinal stage. In fact, they’ve only done that twice. But here’s the thing - both of those quarterfinal exits happened in the only two Australasian RWC’s that South Africa has participated in (the Boks weren’t at the inaugural event in New Zealand in 1987).

So South Africa has not won a World Cup quarterfinal in Australasia, having been thumped by New Zealand at that point of the 2003 World Cup, which was in Australia, and then being pipped by the Aussies in New Zealand eight years later.

Of course there were side stories to both. In 2003 the Boks had a coach who figuratively took out an old 12-bore shot-gun and riddled the squad’s feet with bullets. Remember the Kamp Staaldraad debacle. And in 2011 there was the Bryce Lawrence refereeing freak-show to blame for the quarterfinal defeat at Wellington’s ‘Cake Tin’.

EBEN SHOULD BE PLEASED THAT DIDN’T HAPPENED IN NEW ZEALAND

There’s probably not much that Eben Etzebeth will be happy about right now. His brain fart in Cardiff, for that is what it was, a moment of madness, could prove a significant blow to his brand. In the sense that eye-gouging is rightly seen as a heinous crime within rugby.

By the way, to those who are patriotically fighting Eben's corner, what happened before the incident has no relevance. World Rugby does not allow retaliation as an excuse. And rightly not. Every rugby player knows that. If everyone was allowed to take the law into their own hands, and players run around the field with fingers or thumbs pointing forwards towards their opponents shouting at the top of their lungs, “If you gouge me, I will gouge you”, it would not be a great advertisement for the sport.

Anyway, all those images depicting the Wales player Alex Mann trying to gouge Eben look to me to be the work of AI. Look carefully, it looks like Mann has two thumbs. If there was such an incident, and the video was authentic, surely the Boks would have cited? They haven’t, so move on.

Having said all that, I don’t think what happened in Cardiff should be allowed to spoil Eben’s legacy. He is South Africa’s most capped player. And this was the first such incident he was involved in. But eye-gouging is not acceptable, not in any circumstances, and if he is slapped with a lengthy ban, it would be understandable and acceptable. And I imagine Eben knows that.

Which brings me to someone who did have his Bok legacy ruined by one mad act and what Etzebeth should be happy about. He should be happy the incident happened in Wales at the end of a tour, and not in New Zealand during a tour.

I was in Wellington when Bok prop Johan le Roux became public villain No 1 in that country for biting the ear of the then All Black skipper Sean Fitzpatrick in the second test of the 1994 series.

From the drive home, when all the talk radio hosts were going to town on the incident, there was just one topic in New Zealand - Johan le Roux. And the way he was spoken about by the Kiwi media you might have thought they were talking about Hitler.

The level of interest and animosity towards Le Roux was ridiculous and it continued like that during the two days that followed. I was staying in the team hotel and elected not to fly on to the next Bok game in Dunedin, a midweek clash with Otago, so that I could write about the scenes and the Le Roux disciplinary hearing on the Monday for my then employers, The Independent Group.

There was a posse of photographers on constant duty on the road outside the hotel, waiting for Le Roux to emerge so they could get photographs or a quote or two. I remember thinking that Richard Nixon got off more lightly from a public vilification perspective for the Watergate scandal than what happened to Le Roux in New Zealand. Le Roux was suspended for 19 months, long enough to end his international career.

RIP ROBIN SMITH, THE MOST GIFTED SCHOOLBOY SPORTSMAN

During that aforementioned tour of New Zealand I remember buying a book that I read through in two sittings. It was the autobiography of Robin Smith - “The Quest for No 1”. Of course he wrote a later book that is now better known, about his battles with mental health/alcoholism post his playing career. He was still young then, in 1994, but I found the book intriguing because Robin, who died this week in Perth, was at the same school as me, a few years ahead.

He was quite simply the most gifted allround schoolboy sportsman I ever watched, probably in the league of Herschelle Gibbs, with one of my regrets in life being that I never got to see the Proteas batsman playing flyhalf when he was at school.

My first year at Northlands Boys High, now Northwood College, was arguably the most successful ever for the first teams of the two main sports, cricket and rugby. I remember going to watch the first cricket team play after my own under-13 game had finished in the morning. They were playing against Alexandra High School, who had a decent attack.

But set 144 to win, the school passed the score with three wickets down, all of those wickets going down in a flurry just before the target was reached. Robin's was one of those wickets, but see this - he made 122 of the 144. It was phenomenal, and he was a year or two younger than his teammates.

It was the first time I saw him bat, but it wasn’t too long after, maybe two years, that I saw him make his debut for the Natal senior team in a spiteful and close Datsun Shield (55 overs game) semifinal against Transvaal at Kingsmead. I know it was spiteful because Robin told his mates at the Crusaders sports team what Clive Rice said to him, and Smith would have been only 18 at the time, when he came out to bat. And Robin in his book said his ability to handle the sledging of the Australians in Ashes series was shaped by him having played his early cricket in a team led by Mike Procter, “one of the best sledgers in the game”.

One of Smith’s teammates in the winning 1979 Northlands first cricket team was Hugh Reece-Edwards, who played for SA Schools cricket for two years in a row. The future Springbok fullback never actually played SA Schools rugby. But he did get selected as captain of the Natal Schools 1979 team, which was quite an achievement as that team also featured future Natal Currie Cup winning captain Craig Jamieson.

That was a heady year for the Northland first rugby team, with Reece playing centre alongside Robin, and together with wing Bobby Shaw, who also made Natal Schools, those were the star players.

Weirdly the two games they lost that year were both to Afrikaans medium schools, Port Natal and Voortrekker, but they beat all comers when it came to the rest - DHS, a formidable Glenwood team captained by Derek LaMarque, who was probably as big at school when he was when he played for Natal a few years later. The Maritzburg College game, where Reece-Edwards would have captained against Jamieson, was drawn, but only because in our view the referee must have been a College old boy. We were streets better.

TWIGGED A CONVERSATION I HAD AT AGE OF 14

Anyway, back to Robin. He didn’t play Natal Schools rugby in 1979, and as I said I think he was too young then anyway, but he did play for Natal Schools the following year and I am pretty sure he would have played SA Schools had he stuck around for his final year at school instead of heading to Hampshire to play country cricket.

Apart from plundering mountains of runs with his bat, and there were press articles at the time comparing his school stats with the legendary Barry Richards, who went to DHS and played in the same first team as Lee Irvine, and being a Danie Gerber type centre on the rugby field, Robin was am Olympian in the making at athletics too. I think his formidable record for the shot-putt still stands at the school all these years later.

But it wasn’t just memories of him as a prodigiously gifted batsman that made me particularly sad to hear of the former England batsman’s passing this week, but also the circumstances around his passing. Just a few days before he died there was a wonderful interview with Robin in The Times (UK), where he spoke about his battles with alcohol, which was spawned by the jolt to the system every top professional sportsman probably feels the day they wake up and what was their whole life is no longer that.

It twigs the memory of an argument myself and a schoolmate had with a teacher way back when I was in Std 7, in other words just 14. We didn’t understand why we needed to do accountancy, which for some bizarre reason was a compulsory subject that year, if we weren’t going to be accountants.

Anyway in the argument with that accountancy teacher, I distinctly remember my mate saying: “What about Robin Smith? Is he ever going to be an accountant? Is he ever going to be anything other than a very famous cricketer who makes his money from sport?”

To which the teacher responded that a sports career ends at some point, and that when it does you need to be equipped with the all-round strengths and learnings that will help you adapt to life after that. In other words, get a rounded education.

After meeting Robin’s brother Kippy (Chris), at a school reunion earlier this year, he’d probably agree with me that those words were in a way prescient of what was to come decades later. For Kippy did feel that the singular, goal-driven focus Robin grew up with may have contributed to his later troubles.

SMITH STILL A LEGEND WHERE HE HAD HIS ROOTS

The problems associated with transitioning out of a professional sports career are not confined to cricket. When I was interviewing former Springboks for my most recent book, “Our Blood is Green”, several of them told me they’d struggled to adapt to post-rugby life and some confessed to having had nervous breakdowns and addiction problems.

What really worries me is the possibility that the big focus on school rugby in this country, with so many games being televised, will bring a layer of mental health issues for those schoolboys who don’t graduate from the driven high performance environments in which school first teams operate into the ranks of professional rugby.

Only a minute per centage of schools first team players ever go on to play professional rugby or cricket, something which I think is forgotten by some parents. Robin Smith did make it as a professional cricketer, and he would have made it in rugby too had that been his focus, and like the above-mentioned Hugh Reece-Edwards, who made a life in rugby, he is still considered a legend in the area he grew up in.

Kippy wanted Robin to come back with him to a future school reunion so that he could see for himself and connect with his legacy. I told Kippy I’d like to connect with Robin if that happened, and perhaps even help the trip happen, and it really saddens me that it is now never going to happen.