“The most valuable commodity I know of is information. Wouldn’t you agree?” So says Michael Douglas’ giddily malevolent character Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street. He was right, and not just about educated betting on the rises and falls in the stock market. The protection or loss of intellectual property has been one of the most critical issues in rugby’s professional era.
The battle for information is rugby’s secret war, its very own enigma machine, and South Africa is cracking the code faster than anyone else under the stewardship of Rassie Erasmus. When senior coach Stuart Lancaster left the leaders in European attacking innovation, Leinster, he was replaced by World Cup-winning mentor Jacques Nienaber. Meanwhile, the Springboks’ own Svengali-like supremo has made a point of importing and exporting valuable coaching talent over the past 12 months. He has brought in Tony Brown from New Zealand and Jerry Flannery from Ireland, and he has reclaimed Felix Jones after a very short stint with the English national team.
The ex-Munster full-back and strength and conditioning guru Aled Walters had been important cogs in the South African coaching machine which won the 2019 World Cup. Then they joined England. Walters stayed for less than 12 months, while Jones was gone after only eight matches, leaving the entire administrative and playing set-up dazed and confused:
“We weren’t expecting it. Nobody really saw it coming. It was a bit of a shock. It was a bit of an odd timing.” Northampton full-back George Furbank.
“It has been deeply disappointing and I won’t beat any bones about that. You saw with the performances in New Zealand and at the end of the Six Nations: great momentum and good energy.
“It was totally unexpected, but these things happen in sport and we will move on and make the necessary changes to rectify it.” RFU CEO Bill Sweeney.
Walters has since defected to Ireland and will also join Irish head coach Andy Farrell on the forthcoming Lions trip to Australia, while Jones has boomeranged straight back to the Springboks.
There is little doubt South Africa is forging ahead in this shifting of the-sands, in the furious and often bewildering merry-go-round of cutting-edge coaching talent.
“I’m not sure why things didn’t work out for him over in England, but we are happy to have him back,” said Erasmus recently. “We don’t have egos in the team, and we believe in sharing responsibilities as coaches, so he will be a valuable asset to the coaching team.
Rassie Erasmus has now coached South Africa to successive Rugby World Cups and a Rugby Championship crown (Photo by Michael Steele/Getty Images)
“Felix will be in charge of the player roadmaps and gathering all that information for us, as well as running the extras before and after training, so we plan to use him in all the different departments within our coaching matrix.
“He can assist Mzwandile Stick with the off-the-ball work, and all the other coaches with general tactics and detail in their respective departments, while he will also play a big role in the administrative side of things, so he has a lot on his plate.
”This arrangement will certainly benefit all our national teams, and we are excited to see what he brings to the table once again at all of those levels.”
Given Jones will also be working with the Junior Boks and the Springbok Women, you could be forgiven for viewing him as Rassie’s new ‘Minister of Information’. His whistlestop tour of world rugby, from Ireland to South Africa, to England and back again to the Republic, makes the 37-year-old the perfect man to build an IP bridge to all aspects of South African rugby. If Walters and Nienaber eventually follow the same pathway, they will probably be weighed, and their skillsets utilised in similar fashion.
Is there a cunning plan in place to seed South African coaches into important roles within European rugby, only for ‘the wild geese’ to fly back home when they have collected the relevant information and done their work?
The reasons behind Jones’ sudden departure have never been clarified, but the outcome has been clear and obvious indeed. Jones left England floundering on defence and quite unable to hire the right man to continue his excellent work. They could not find anyone who can oversee a Springbok-style rush defence and that is the main reason their progress has stalled.
Meanwhile Leinster and Ireland’s IP is no longer proprietary, and Nienaber will have been able to see and experience it from the inside in Dublin. It has now passed into the mainstream of rugby knowledge, and it will be much harder for the men in green to maintain their position at the top of the tree from now on. Plan or no plan, Rassie’s charges are currently sitting pretty in the information war.
South Africa’s own systems, and their contributions to rugby innovation, are running as smoothly as ever – long scrumming, bench scrumming off the 6-2 or the 7-1 split; close-range driving lineout variations; a blitz defence which can only really be coached by two men at the highest level, Jones and Nienaber.
Let’s take a deep dive into one of the Springbok specialities – variety in converting opportunities from the lineout drive. In matches between the top-tier nations in 2024, a try was scored on 56% of occasions from lineout starters on the 5m line. That figure dropped to 39% for lineout starters between 6-10m out, and a mere 10% from 11m to the 22m line. I am indebted to Corris Thomas at World Rugby for the following table and observations:
South Africa generated the most lineouts and had the most success from them.
The three most successful teams held the top three positions in the World Rugby rankings [South Africa, Ireland and New Zealand].
South Africa, Ireland and New Zealand threw into 40 5-metre lineouts, a total noticeably greater than lower-ranked England, France and Scotland, who threw into a total of only 17.
The position of South Africa, Ireland and New Zealand at the top of both trees – global ranking and success in generating, and scoring from 5m lineouts – are in no way accidental. That table is a shorthand for international success.
The maul may look like a static and relatively straightforward contest of brute strength, but like every other area of the game it is undergoing a constant state of refinement and evolution. South Africa are the master improvisers and problem-solvers. When the Boks found they could not go straight through the All Blacks pack in the 2023 World Cup warm-up at Twickenham, they unearthed methods of going around it.
New Zealand’s defence was based around the ability of their prop at the front of the lineout [here, number 18 Fletcher Newell] to drive his Springbok opposite [Steven Kitshoff] off early, so in this case the Boks run a shift-drive beyond Kitshoff as quickly as possible.
Later in the game, the Boks found other methods of skinning the same cat.
As soon as Newell sticks his head in on short-side maul defence, it is a cue for the Boks to work the ball instantly off the back and give Siya Kolisi and Malcolm Marx a two-on-one against Aaron Smith near the sideline. It was a sign South Africa were thinking their way through the questions the All Blacks were posing, rather than just trying to knock the front door down by pure force of arms.
As the notorious gangster Al Capone reputedly said, “You get a lot more from a kind word and a gun, than from a kind word alone,” and the Springboks bolstered the will to dominate with the cleverness to cajole on that memorable Friday evening at the old cabbage patch.
Roll forward to the first round of the 2024 Rugby Championship, and the Boks were innovating in their favourite area once more.
South Africa would have noted from Australia’s series against Wales the Wallabies’ eagerness to commit to the first point of contact, so they designed a one-two punch specifically measured to exploit it. The drive goes straight ahead in the first example, in the second Kolisi peels away from the base. It is Rassie to a tee: always one step ahead.
We may never know if the early exits of Walters and Jones from the England coaching group were simply accidental: the result of a bad fit, or grand strategical masterstrokes by the Springbok supremo. What is certain is the flow of information in and out of the South African camp is running hot – hotter than in any other Tier One country.
There is a ready fusion of knowledge from both sides of the equator – from Nienaber and Jones up north, and from Brown down south – no other nation on planet rugby can match. There is no question South Africa is winning the secret information war, and breaking coaching encryption codes from all over the world quicker than anyone else. To paraphrase another famous Gekko statement from Wall Street:
“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all its forms; greed for life, for love, for knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.”
Erasmus would probably be nodding his head in ready agreement.
