Aisle be Back: Bokke washup and NPC Week Six

Above: Vaea Fifita and Greg Foe and the Wellington Lions play Manawatu for the Coronation Cup this coming Sunday in Palmerston North, kick-off 4.35pm. 

Losing may be bad, but sometimes winning is worse.

Everyone’s talking about Saturday’s seismic result from the New Zealand perspective, as if that is all that matters.

What, though, will South Africa take from it once the tears have subsided.

Well, if they play to their strengths and play out of their skins for 80 minutes, they can match the All Blacks and rattle them badly.

Which on the scale of revelations, would not get remotely near your well-thumbed copy of the New Testament.

It’s always been that way, it’s why South Africa are our greatest foes. It’s why the thought of them being competitive in a genuinely scary way is so appealing.

Look at their last two matches against the All Blacks and they’re actually one solitary point ahead on differential. How great is that?

But that’s a bit like drawing a line between the stockmarket before Lehman’s collapsed, and the stockmarket today, and ignoring the bit in between as irrelevant.

Remembering that those two matches were with two different Bok coaches, it’s hardly a definitive data set about the future under Rassie Erasmus.

In between his side have beaten a struggling England, but tanked against Argentina and the seventh-best side in the world, the Wallabies.

Of course they grow an arm and a leg against the All Blacks, but that just begs the question of whether they can do so against everyone else. If the Boks are the real deal, let’s see them skewer other tier 1 countries, as the All Blacks do.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love the Springboks to restore the rivalry, but they have to get plenty of miles on the clock. So they would be very wrong to take this victory as a sign the ship is righted.

As for the discovery that if you get in the face of the All Blacks, they get rattled, well that we know from the Lions tour. The rush defence is not new, and the All Blacks have been working with it for some time now, hence the dynamic attacking game.

What they’ll be wrestling with more is the shock of being behind and being unable to blast through. We lost count of how many times the side under McCaw did the Lazarus, so it’s something that - what is still a frighteningly young All Black side - will have to learn.

And how good is the atmosphere going to be in Pretoria, three weeks from now. Can’t wait!

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I adopt an NFL team occasionally. Typically the worst team. That used to be the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, but then they ruined everything by winning a Super Bowl and I had to abandon them.

So now it’s the Cleveland Browns. This year they are threatening to score more than their average one win per season. But in game 2, their kicker Gonzalez had a shocker and cost them a likely victory over the Saints.

I don’t know what it means exactly, but a writer there said Gonzalez deserved empathy, but not sympathy. In short, if we talk about Beauden Barrett, we can feel what he might feel like having a bad night, but hey, it’s his job to kick goals. So kick goals better, or somewhere down the line, there will be consequences.

I imagine the consequences arrive a lot quicker in the NFL – and that’s not always a good trait.

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Governments get accused of dumping bad news on Fridays. I used to work in both the press gallery and then later in a Ministry, and yes, it’s sometimes true. I used to dub four o’clock on a Friday as snake o’clock, because something cray cray would often happen.

So can I accuse Canterbury of dumping bad news on a Sunday? Just in case anyone missed it, they got thumped by Auckland in Christchurch. The score doesn’t say so, but some late scores closed the gap.

They won’t be yelling that from the rooftop.

Of course Graham Henry has a hand in the background with this young Auckland team.

As for the Lions, well keep on keeping on. Plenty of good running rugby, and at this stage, still on track for the finals.