The Springboks won, but the Wallabies made a statement

What might have been!

After the glories of last week’s staggering win against the Boks, coming back from 22-0 down after 20 minutes to win 38-22 at full-time – as I think I might have mentioned once or twice? – this second Test at Cape Town was always going to be hard.

But, this hard?

The conditions were heavy, the track sluggish, the ball heavy, and the Bok forwards as huge as they were hungry for revenge.

Key line-ball refereeing decisions didn’t quite go our way. And our injury toll was so steep, if you’d put a tollgate on the Wallabies dressing room door and charged a dollar a pop, you could damn nigh buy a Cape Town cappuccino by game’s end. It was the injuries that weighed heaviest, upsetting the cohesion of our back-line.

Both full-back Tom Wright and half-back Nic White were gone within the opening ten minutes, to a knee injury and concussion respectively, but not before White was able to pull off a masterful move.

From a Wallabies tap-penalty about forty metres out from the Bok line, the extravagantly mustachioed one – once described by Andrew Mehrtens as “looking like a Wellington bobby from 1910” – had tapped-and-gone-before-the-Boks-had-lifted-their-heads.

As the defence closed, he managed to weight a perfect kick behind their defence for debutant Wallabies winger Corey Toole to regather and go over for the goodies, putting us ahead 7-6!

Thereafter, while the forward clashes between the piano-shifters were fierce, much of the stuff out back between the piano-players consisted of a contest between how well each set of backs dealt with endless box kicks. Alas, the Boks boxes were marginally more successful than ours in the heads-or-tails nature of such things in these muddy conditions, and their two tries in the first half were built on good territorial gains from our spills.

If that didn’t necessarily make for the scintillating open play everyone was hoping for, still the Wallabies were able to keep in touch, heading into the halftime break down 20-10.

What now?

Exactly. As the commentators noted, the Springboks’ play to this point was distinctly one-dimensional and they mostly only looked dangerous when battering our line with forward rushes.

By contrast, it was the Wallabies who always threatened to strike from all over the field, trying sleight-of-hand, looping passes, flick-passes, hang-passes and clever kicks to unlock the Bok defensive door.

Eight minutes into the second half, they did just that, after a perfectly weighted chip kick by James O’Connor was regathered by the Wallabies winger Max Jorgensen and . . .

And pause for a moment, while the ball is in the air. When O’Connor made his Wallabies debut, back in 2008, wee Max was just four years old. But now here they are. Go for it, Max!

Jorgensen – rugby’s answer to Eddie Everywhere – scrambled like a mad thing to recover the ball, stepped the defence to score and his converted try meant the Boks were now leading by just 20-17, as the Bok crowd went wonderfully quiet.

See?

Going toe-to-toe in this slug-fest it was the Boks who were blinking, the Boks who were doubting, while the Wallabies were testing them at every level.

Already in the first half the Wallabies had been denied one miracle try by our back-rower and stand-in skipper Fraser McReight – which had first been awarded by the referee – only for the slo-mo replay to reveal that in the process Wallabies winger Andrew Kellaway had knocked the ball on by the length of an unzipped bee.

Similarly, in the second half after Corey Toole – him again – had chipped ahead and Kellaway had raced ahead to regather for what might have been the winning try, the Boks defence, in extremis, just managed to thwart it.

And yet?

And yet despite everything being against the visitors, we were still in with a hell of a shot to win the whole thing when replacement hooker Brandon Paenga-Amosa barged over with eleven minutes to go.

Unfortunately that shot – a conversion attempt by James O’Connor 10 metres from the left upright – missed. Had he made it, the Wallabies would have been ahead 24-23 on the final stretch, and beggars would ride, in green and gold jerseys.

Instead, it turned into a slug-fest again, and chances went begging by bare, hungry, sniffing centimetres. A good Bok try by lock Eben Etzebeth with five minutes to go settled the result, with the final score 30-22, but altered nowt the great conclusions that could be drawn from the match.

Firstly, and most importantly, the Wallabies have confirmed their return to the forefront of contenders for best team in the world in the near future. Those last two Tests against the Lions weren’t flukes, and nor was last week’s great result. (Did I mention? 38-22!)

Our team is performing more consistently and at higher level than they have for two generations, going all the way back to the Eales side of 2001. At no point in all those years have they ever put together four such great performances against such high-quality opposition.

What is more, they are playing with a spirit we can be proud of. Time and again McReight eschewed easy penalty goals to go for tries instead. Time and again, we tried to beat brute force with creativity, and very nearly got there.

Bravo to the Springboks, they were worthy winners on the day.

But the Wallabies are coming. And if you cock your ear to east, I don’t say that the chattering on the sea-breeze you can hear is necessarily the All Blacks fans fearing the Wallabies arrival in a few weeks time, but they’re watching alright.

And they’ll know we’re coming to play for the Bledisloe itself.

Game on.

Watch every match of The Rugby Championship and Bledisloe Cup live and on demand on Stan Sport kicking off 17 August.