Ken Borland

An All Blacks side whose skills let them down in a Test match is certainly not the norm, and flyhalf Richie Mounga admitted on Monday that it was Springbok pressure that led to New Zealand’s error-strewn display in a 26-10 defeat at the Mbombela Stadium at the weekend.

South Africa produced an epic defensive display: their rush off the line, their scrambling and physical dominance of the gain-line; and their aerial mastery and an outstanding performance by the pack in the set-pieces were all too much for the All Blacks as the Springboks recorded their biggest winning margin over their greatest rivals since their 17-0 win in Durban in 1928.

“It was obviously very disappointing for us but it confirmed how good this South African team is,” Mounga said at their Sandton hotel on Monday. “They just build so much pressure.

“With their set-piece, coming round the corner and getting penalties, it just becomes an ongoing cycle that is really difficult to get out of. We’ll have to talk about how to counter that.

“It was just a matter of skill errors. You don’t have to be in the right frame of mind to catch the ball, to do your job or do the basics right. But not doing those put is in that cycle.

“It’s called a Test match for a reason because it will test your skill. It was tough to get around them, their high line put us under big pressure. The things we spoke about in order to combat that, we didn’t do well at all,” Mounga, who is likely to start at flyhalf on Saturday at Ellis Park because Beauden Barrett was injured in his collision with Kurt-Lee Arendse, said.

The classy Crusaders star said the All Blacks are trying to shut out all the outside noise, but he understands why their fans are up in arms.

“We know our fans can get frustrated with results and that is very fair, and it’s fair for them to care,” Mounga said. “We know that our performance was not good enough for All Blacks standard.

“But we don’t care what the fans think, I don’t really care what people think if they’re not in our squad. We are so close, but close is not good enough at this level.

“The Springboks’ game-plan is simple – they build numerous consecutive positive plays and that puts you under pressure. It takes just simple execution to change that.

“The most basic skills we couldn’t execute, but if we can fix that then we can start to put them under pressure. At the moment we’re frustrated because we’re making the same errors,” Mounga said.

The Proteas may not yet have all the answers for the T20 World Cup starting in Australia in October, but coach Mark Boucher said the 2-2 series draw in India has certainly dealt with many of the questions surrounding the side.

The fifth and decisive T20 was washed out at the weekend, and although there was disappointment that South Africa lost the previous two games and therefore failed to wrap up the series win, Boucher said he was satisfied with the overall result.

“It’s always tough coming here to play India. I know a lot of top players were not here, but the depth they have, largely due to the IPL, is really good. On the back of the IPL, those players were in good form and had been playing on these pitches,” Boucher said.

“I will take 2-2, even though we did not play our best cricket. But we asked a few questions in this series and we got a lot of answers. Our plans will probably change a bit in Australia, but we take confidence from this series.

“We had two good games and two bad games, and there were reasons for that. We tried a few options in these conditions, and there were periods we played really well and periods when there was lots to learn,” Boucher said.

The powerplay was the main area of concern for Boucher, the coach admitting that India had bossed the crucial first six overs of the innings, with both bat and ball. But the absence of Aiden Markram, who missed the entire series due to a positive Covid test, was the most disruptive blow to their plans.

“It was tough to lose Aiden before we even started. That put us under pressure because we wanted to play six batsmen with Aiden as our sixth bowling option. That was a massive loss to our batting up front,” Boucher said.

“The batting up front was probably the biggest thing to think about. We struggled to get going with the bat. We speak about it every game, the importance of intent. It’s about how we change the mindset. In the third game especially we did not show enough intent up front.

“The bowling was very good at stages, but at other times we looked a bit rusty. And our batsmen were up against quality bowling, I thought Bhuvneshwar Kumar was special the whole series, he really put us under pressure in the powerplay.

“In fact, India dominated us in the powerplay with both bat and ball,” Boucher said.

One can learn so many life lessons from sport and I am convinced that more can be learned from golf than most other codes. My own golf is certainly a lesson in dealing with frustration and how to extricate oneself from seemingly unreachable positions.

But professional golf, especially the Majors, provides such human drama and, as in life, disaster or glorious success seem just as likely to occur on the next hole.

Last weekend in the PGA Championship at Southern Hills, Mito Pereira was one hole away from one of the most astounding Major triumphs. He had seemingly beaten off numerous, way more experienced and storied challengers, on a chaotic final day to stand on the 18^th tee clinging to a one-stroke lead. All he needed was a par to become one of the rare rookies, playing just his second Major championship, to win on one of golf’s grandest stages.

The 27-year-old from Santiago, Chile, decided to go the aggressive route, and hit Driver. Except he made an awful swing and deposited his ball in the creek down the right, leading to a double-bogey. Not only was Pereira no longer at the top of the leaderboard, he wasn’t even in the playoff that would decide the fate of the Wanamaker Trophy, Justin Thomas eventually emerging as the champion.

When Pereira decided to take the risky route on the last, you could almost hear Sir Nick Faldo tearing his hair out in the commentary box. The man who famously made 18 pars to win the first of his six Major championships in the 1987 Open at Muirfield, could not fathom why the leader had not just played it safe.

It was a most frustrating end to what would have been a fairytale win. I have no doubt Pereira just went with Driver because it had worked before.

While sympathy for his cruel fate was the over-riding emotion, it does anger me when highly-talented sportspeople justify poor decision-making by saying things like “that’s just the way I play, that’s my game.”

Just as the rest of us have to adapt to the various challenges and frustrations of life, so sports stars have to adapt to their circumstances. Play the situation!

If you’re roaring to victory by four shots, or your team is 370/3 or 30-7 up, by all means be aggressive. But the truly great sports heroes are able to tailor their game to whatever the situation, or their team, requires in order to win.

For now, Pereira will be walking the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, but he certainly showed he has game and I will be surprised if he does not win on the PGA Tour, once he gets over this heartbreak. Most importantly, how he handled the devastating blow has been widely acclaimed and he fronted up to the media after his round when all he would have wanted was to go and hide away somewhere. Dealing with failure is another life lesson, of course.

Long-form sports, where the tension is gradually ramped up before it reaches a tremendous crescendo on the final day, are right up my street. Golf’s Majors, and especially the Ryder Cup, are still such compelling viewing even in an age where the cancer of instant gratification seems to reign supreme.

Golf can be just as slow as Test cricket, but the feeling of that tension building as you reach the final round is a bit like a Hitchcock horror movie – a masterful building of suspense.

Sport needs to have good stories, as well as the best players in the world in the limelight. How good was it to have an unknown like Pereira challenging for what would have been an incredible win in the PGA Championship?

Even though he was pipped in the end by one of the world’s best in Thomas, it was still wonderfully dramatic.

Test cricket can perhaps learn its own life lessons from golf. It can provide just as much drama, but it needs to be properly packaged, marketed and looked after by the ICC.

A successful choir obviously needs everyone singing together in complementary fashion and the Proteas’ success over the last summer has certainly been a team effort, but coach Mark Boucher has spoken of the importance of having the two captains, Dean Elgar and Temba Bavuma, singing from the same hymn sheet.

Since the unfortunate experiment with Quinton de Kock as captain, Elgar and Bavuma have taken over the red and white-ball sides respectively for the last 13 months and the split captaincy has worked well, although the consistency of the limited-overs side has perhaps left something to be desired.

“Dean and Temba came in as leaders in a tough time,” Boucher said. “They are completely different characters, but they have rubbed off on each other. They feed off each other and they speak to each other a lot.

“They have also both been in really good form with the bat and have been leading from the front.

“What’s been particularly good is that they are on the same page when it comes to where they want to take South African cricket,” Boucher said.

Elgar said the success of the Test team has helped to ease the burden of captaincy, which is never easy when there is so much going on off the field to deal with.

“Everything good comes with a challenge and I like challenges,” Elgar said. “That’s why I’m still playing Test cricket at nearly 35 years old and I feel my best cricket is still ahead of me.

“If I was younger, maybe I wouldn’t enjoy the captaincy as much. It has been extremely testing off the field, but I have an amazing core of players around me, they respect and understand me as a person.

“I think we’re in a very special place as a team and that leads to me being a lot happier with what I’m doing. Getting results and playing good, strong cricket, definitely eases the burden of captaincy,” Elgar said.

Elgar and Boucher are both hard-nosed leaders who would perhaps not be out of place training recruits in the marine corps. And they have both suggested the players who went to the IPL instead of playing in the Bangladesh series will not automatically get their Test places back.

“I don’t think it’s fair to just say they come back,” Elgar said. “The guys playing now have made a massive statement. We have a decent batting pool now.

“Someone like Ryan Rickelton has taken to Test cricket pretty well, he’s had a taste and now understands it. Even if the intensity was not quite what it will be playing England.

“But it’s out of my hands whether the IPL guys get selected again,” Elgar said.

“The IPL guys did vacate their spots and there is now good competition for those spots. It’s a nice position to be in,” Boucher said.