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Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin with a story from a different era of rugby over 40 years ago, well before the advent of professionalism. A well-known, but highly-respected referee had just finished managing a Five Nations match between England and Ireland, in which he had kept the game flowing and penalized only the offences which were absolutely necessary.
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At the dinner after the game, England captain and future World Rugby chair Bill Beaumont got up to speak: “I don’t normally do this… but I want to start by complimenting the referee for an exceptional performance. He was the best man on the field by far, and he deserved the man-of-the match award.” Cue a few guffaws from the suits. It was one of many pats on the back the official received after the game, from players and coaches alike.
Only a few days later, then-RFU secretary secretary Ron Tennick called, inviting the same man to adjudicate an age-group match for the England under-19 team. ‘It would be the best way for our youngsters to learn to play the game’, added Tennick.
But when the official received his report card from the referees’ assessor, it came back marked in red with a ‘D’, the lowest score possible. It contained a long litany of infractions either missed, or ignored. Don Rutherford, who had been appointed the first-ever Technical Director of the RFU back in 1969 and was acknowledged to be one of the most progressive rugby minds of his era, disagreed with the assessment in no uncertain terms.
Rutherford was the driving force behind major changes which sped up the game and increased its appeal to future generations of players, and he made strategic use of his position as England’s representative on the coaching committee of the International Rugby Board to bypass old-fashioned objections and rubber-stamp those changes in law. He had both the technical nous and a broader vision of what the game could be. He dismissed most as immaterial to the outcome of the play in which they occurred.
That one story epitomizes the ongoing debate behind the scenes between the priests and the prophets, between the custodians of the letter of the law in Rugby, and those who think in terms of the game’s future potential: rugby’s phoney war. A new phase of that phoney war is primed to explode with the Greatest Rivalry tour of South Africa by the New Zealand All Blacks.
In the red corner, double World Cup winner Steve Hansen on the Rugby Unity podcast:
“What we saw [in the Nations Championship] was the attitude of the teams themselves wanting to attack and use the ball in different ways, and people got excited by it.
“You can see the All Blacks definitely have a fixation on what they want to do and a real clarity around that.
“There has been a slight change maybe in the refs’ attitudes, like ‘let’s reward attacking rugby’, and for me that’s the way it should always be.
“We want people to see tries being scored and the less involvement that we have with the man with the whistle and the TMO and all their friends, the better.”
We play an expansive style of rugby. No side in the world can keep up with us in regards to the way we play, our fitness and our athleticism.
All Blacks players and supporters alike are getting excited, with ex-Crusaders and All Blacks’ scrum-half Bryn Hall predicting that ‘I seriously think we’re going to run [the Boks] off their feet’, and extreme voices like Kiwi radio host Mark Watson ramping up the rhetoric on Sports Nation NZ:
“We play an expansive style of rugby. No side in the world can keep up with us in regards to the way we play, our fitness and our athleticism, and that is our DNA. The problem with it is South Africa will do everything to slow it down. We will see injury being feigned. We will see contact lenses coming out and needing to be put back in to give themselves a bit of a break, try and recover, try and get their breath back.
“We are going to need a very good, tough, hard referee who’s going to see through the BS, allow the game to flow and tell the South Africans we’re just going to keep playing. A rugby side should not be punished because of a strength and a skill-set they bring to a game. You watch the South Africans. They will push the grey. They will be what I describe as legally correct and morally corrupt.”
It is petty propaganda of course, but it is also part of a real battle to influence the hearts and minds of everyone associated with the officiating crews appointed to the tour games, headed up by Englishmen Matt Carley and Karl Dickson, Georgian Nika Amashukeli and Australian Angus Gardner. More recently, Springbok supremo Rassie Erasmus came out swinging from the blue corner, with a very different agenda in mind:
“I think there’s a big drive from a lot of people to say that attack is the beautiful part of the game. We like to think defence is, we think scrums are, the kicking game is, we think side-steps are, we think passing is. That’s what makes the game so special.
“I think World Rugby, they’re driving and supporting the attacking side of the game a hell of a lot, and I guess if that’s their main goal, they’re succeeding, because there’s lots of big scores. [But] sometimes for us, a spectacle is just a really tense Test match where it’s one or two points.”
This recent article highlighted why this tour will be a war of contrasts and a huge clash of styles:
That contrast will run all through the tour games, not just the Test series. At club/provincial level in the URC, the four ex-Super Rugby franchises have remained more ‘traditional’ in their tactical approach than Rassie’s Boks. Matches involving the Lions, Stormers, Sharks and Bulls averaged 32.5 minutes of ball-in-play time in the 2025-26 URC season, in a league where the average is just under 36 minutes; they built 70 rucks per game in a competition where the average is 85, and the top sides like Glasgow Warriors average 117.
The Bulls, Sharks and Stormers ranked as the top three scrummaging teams in the tournament with a massive collective scrum penalty differential of plus 110 between them over the course of the regular season. The provincial backdrop to the Boks is even more starkly defined than the national team: low ball-in-play time and little emphasis on ruck-building, but strong defence and transition counters; above all else, the ultimate wagon-laager of tremendous power at set-piece.
Whatever else they can or cannot do on a rugby field, all of the All Blacks’ opponents [with the exception of the Lions] will be able to follow the maxim from ‘Oom’ Paul Roos’ 1937 telegram to the hilt: ‘Skrum. Skrum. Skrum’, and they will be all looking to maximise penalty advantage from their own feed. The following table accurately portrays the state of the modern scrum:
Like most teams in the world, the three South African teams win penalties galore on their own feed, but when their opponents put the ball into the scrum, the penalty count either levels out, or is reversed. Even in the November encounter between the Springboks and Ireland, which was about as one-sided as it gets at scrum-time, the Bokke won all their penalties and drew yellow cards on props Andrew Porter and Paddy McCarthy exclusively on their own feed. Ireland won three of their own feeds cleanly, and even squeezed a free-kick out of South Africa at the fourth.
For the average joe sitting in the bleachers, the question arises why the teeth which look so sharp on its own feed are mostly pulled on the opponent’s. With the feeding side winning 94% of their own ball at the recent Nations Championship, all the cards are stacked in favour of the put-in, and something of the playing charter’s stated desire for ‘a balance of contestability and continuity’ has been temporarily lost at set-piece.
The referee for the first Test at Ellis Park also happens to be Englishman Matt Carley, the man who had to make so many scrum rulings in the game in Dublin. At his daytime job in the Prem, Carley averaged 38 minutes of ball-in-play, 10 tries and 20 penalties per game. On that dark November evening in the Irish capital, the ball-in-play time dropped to 36 minutes, the tries scored to four but the penalty count rose to 31.
One of the key micro-battles in the Test series is shaping to be the contest between Tyrel Lomax and ‘Ox’ Nche on the right side of the New Zealand front row. The All Blacks will be hoping, nay praying, that ‘turnaround Tyrel’ has swung around yet another corner in his career successfully and returned to his world-leading 2024 form.
Lomax will be central to New Zealand’s hopes of stopping South Africa from winning penalties on their own scrum feed and controlling the tempo of the game. That is what he did so successfully in Cape Town a couple of years ago, against the redoubtable Ox. Lomax started off with the sort of scrum he did not want, and he had to endure the whoops and hollers from a baying Capetonian crowd:
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) August 5, 2026
6ft 4in Lomax gets lifted by 5ft 9in fireplug Nche, the All Blacks tight five disintegrates as the scrum develops, a penalty award inevitably follows and the crowd enters a state of delirium. It was a picture-perfect start for the Springbok scrum, but by the middle of the first period Lomax had stabilized the All Blacks’ set-piece:
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) August 5, 2026
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) August 5, 2026
At these two scrums the big Hurricanes’ tighthead is more than holding his own, he is the one doing the dominating, and South Africa are forced to use the ball rather than trying to win penalties from the set-piece.
— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) August 5, 2026
The Springboks hold the ball in an attempt at the double shove, but it is New Zealand which lasts the course of a long scrum better, with both Ethan de Groot and Lomax drilling straight through their opposite numbers. If the 2026 All Blacks are to have any chance of winning the Greatest Rivalry series, they need a repeat from both men on the Springbok feed. That is a non-negotiable.
The phoney war on the Greatest Rivalry tour is already gale-force in its intensity. One World Cup-winning coach demands a fast-moving attacking game with 40 minutes plus ball-in-play time; the other wants more defence, more set-piece and ball-in-play time closer to the low or mid-30s. Whoever wins the war off the field will more than likely win the battle on it. Whatever happens, rugby’s future needs to emerge from the tour with a gleaming ‘A’ grade, not a mud-splattered, blood-drenched ‘D’.
This article was originally published by RugbyPass.
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