All Blacks to give Boks a taste of their own innovative medicine?
SPOTLIGHT: Rassie Erasmus has established himself as the king of innovation in the rugby world, and it might be something the All Blacks will need to try and match if they want to get the better of the Springboks in the Greatest Rivalry series.
New Zealand’s eight-match tour consists of four Test matches, and it could come down to fine-tuning strategies against the opposing coaching team.
A four-Test series will also be a new challenge for All Blacks defence Tana Umaga, who will be looking to outsmart fellow Kiwi and Bok attack coach Tony Brown.
“It’s obviously something I haven’t come across before in my coaching career,” Umaga told Jason Pine on Newstalk ZB.
“Apart from after the first Test, when we have a midweek game, we’re just preparing for Test matches and making little tweaks; you have to improve.
“We know that a week’s a long time in rugby in terms of how you can change tactics, how you can adapt to what you’ve seen the week before. So, it’s an interesting kind of environment that we’ll be in, and it’ll probably just unfold as we go through it.
“I’m looking forward to that, and hopefully we can be a bit innovative around what we do there.”
While being innovative could be a factor, the All Blacks will not be changing their DNA for the Bok matches.
New Zealand are still currently finding their feet under Dave Rennie, but it is clear that they are focusing on a style that plays fast and one that can be possession-heavy.
“Once you’ve started on that trajectory, you have to keep going with it,” Umaga said. “It’s what we’ve stated and what we train, so you’ve got to keep pushing those boundaries and keep persevering.
“And we’ve got a group of guys that really want to play that kind of rugby. We just know that we need to be at our best once we get to South Africa, because we know they’re sitting there, waiting for us and looking at us, and they’ll be very confident in knocking us over.
“We’ve just got to handle what happens in our camp, being the best at it.
“It is a style of rugby that is very attractive, but it means that we have to be very good at our detail and very good at the fundamentals of the game.”
To achieve that style, it will also come down to picking the right players and combinations.
“All of those things are important for us. It’s always on the horizon; you’ve always got to look at the big picture, which is that World Cup,” Umaga added.
“It’s not that we don’t work towards making sure we get success in all of the matches we play in South Africa, but there are some bigger things at play for us around growing depth and around who we are, what we want, how we want to be perceived by our public and our country that we represent. Those things are really important to us, too.
“We’ll develop that while we’re away, and hopefully that’s what people will get to see.”
Additional reporting: Ned Lester (RugbyPass)
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