When the final whistle went, Richie McCaw didn’t celebrate, though his team-mates were jumping up and down all around him. Instead, he strode up to Victor Matfield and shook his hand. McCaw and Matfield first played a Test against each other way back in 2002, a 41-20 win for the All Blacks in Wellington, a lot less tense than this, their latest, and last, encounter. Everyone else who played that day has long since retired from international rugby, as will Matfield and McCaw soon enough. Both have one game left to play, one in the play-off for third place, the other the World Cup final, assuming the New Zealand captain isn’t punished for the way in which he caught Francois Louw with his elbow.
It was a fine thing, to see McCaw and Matfield standing, talking, in the pouring rain, each ignoring their pain. One offering his congratulations, the other his commiserations, at the end of a heavyweight contest, settled, in the end, by only two points, neither side able to land a knockout blow.
The simple stats suggest that New Zealand should have won by many more than they did. They had two-thirds of the territory and almost as great a share of the possession, made more than twice the metres, clean breaks, and carries. That they didn’t was down to their own indiscipline, the accuracy of Handrè Pollard’s goal-kicking, and the Springboks’ bloody-minded refusal to yield to them. New Zealand conceded 13 penalties, seven of them in their own half. Pollard kicked five and, after he had left the field, Pat Lambie another. Which added up to all 18 of their points. New Zealand, on the other hand, scored two fine tries, the first by the superb Jerome Kaino, the second by Beauden Barrett. You wondered whether, after the first in the fifth minute, they were going to cut South Africa apart. Instead they found themselves in a real dogfight of a game, wrestling for the lead, uneasy all the way through to the final minute.
It was made by McCaw and finished by Kaino. McCaw sent a high pass looping up and down over a South African tackler, Kaino stretched up his right arm and pulled the ball in without breaking stride, then set off towards the corner, handing off Lood de Jager on his way to the line. New Zealand would likely have scored more if they hadn’t been so hell-bent on the tactic of sending through grubber kicks into the corners behind the South Africa wings; a ploy concocted before the match, and which they turned too often, though it seldom bought them any success. The first of them was sent through to Dane Coles on the left wing, he dived to try and catch it but it just slipped into touch. It seemed cute that time, but it soon started to wear thin when they used it over and again. Milner-Skudder tried another, and so did Ma’a Nonu.
South Africa had cooked up a couple of plans of their own, with Pollard and Fourie du Preez bombarding Milner‑Skudder with a series of high kicks, then sending Bryan Habana sprinting in to compete with him for them. Such was New Zealand’s defence, though, that the breaks created were soon shut down in midfield. Instead South Africa fed off penalties, Pollard kicking four in the first half, to give them a 12-7 lead. They had only once lost in the World Cup when they had been leading at half-time, and that was to Japan in this tournament. On top of that, New Zealand were a man down, Kaino having been sent to the sin-bin for kicking the ball away while he was offside. New Zealand, then, up against it. They spent the interval out in the middle, running through passing drills.
As the second half wore on, Dan Carter took charge. He clawed three points back with a drop goal. And he was there to steal the ball of Schalk Burger in the runup to his team’s second try. That, too, started with a grubber, kicked by Beauden Barrett. Julian Savea stooped to gather it but knocked on as he did so. Burger broke off the back of the ensuing scrum but was stripped of the ball in contact. Savea and Kaino charged, then the ball was spread wide to Nonu. You could see JP Pietersen wavering, staring at Nonu as he rushed towards him. The centre sent the ball on to Barrett, who slid over. New Zealand had the lead. Later Carter was there again, chasing back to hack the ball clear after South Africa broke down the right wing chasing a kick from Lambie.
Inexorably, irresistibly, New Zealand took back control of the match and kept it. In the final minutes, New Zealand set up an attempt at a drop goal. But Carter changed his mind even as he was shaping to kick, as he had too little time and space to work in. So the All Blacks were forced, instead, to sit on their two-point lead, and shut down the match. They did it so well that when South Africa won the ball back, they were not even able to get near to the half-way line. As Steve Hansen said afterwards, great wins don’t always look like their 62-13 thrashing of France.
