SCRUMATME — THE DAILY SCRUM
SPRINGBOKS 29–24 ALL BLACKS
FNB STADIUM, SOWETO — 5 SEPTEMBER 2026
Last week Dave Rennie stood in front of a microphone in Cape Town and suggested that the Springbok scrum has been walking around. Not scrumming. Walking. Like a man doing his rounds at a shopping centre. He said New Zealand had put the pictures through the World Rugby feedback process, he said it calmly, and he said it in a week where two Tests were still to be played. We wrote an article about it. We were reasonably restrained, by our standards.
On Saturday, on the stroke of half-time, in front of 85 967 people in Soweto, with the score at 12–7 to New Zealand and the whole night hanging on it, the Springbok scrum engaged, took a breath, and put the All Blacks pack backwards so comprehensively that the referee stopped looking for a penalty and started looking for the seven points. Penalty try. 12–12. No kicker required. No conversion required. No debate required. Dave, my brother — the scrum scored. It did not walk around. It walked through. There is a difference, and roughly 86 000 people in Soweto were kind enough to explain it at volume.
And here is the part that must be said properly, because it is bigger than a joke about a press conference. The Springboks had played at FNB Stadium against New Zealand twice before and lost both. Soweto had given this team everything — the noise, the faith, the Sunday-best turnout, the whole calabash roaring — and had never once been given a win against the All Blacks in return. More than a decade of showing up. More than a decade of going home quiet. On Saturday that debt was finally settled, in a stadium built for a football World Cup final, in the middle of the township that gave this country its spine, in a Test match that the two unions have branded as the greatest rivalry in the sport. They were not wrong about the branding. They just did not know who was going to collect.
It was not comfortable. Let nobody who was not in the ground tell you it was comfortable. Ardie Savea came out of the tunnel like a man who had read the team talk and then eaten it. He finished a quick lineout move after Asafo Aumua had run at the line, and five minutes after Kurt-Lee Arendse had answered in the corner, Savea gathered a loose ball and went again. Two tries. His 34th and 35th in a New Zealand jersey. The first twenty-five minutes were, in Siya Kolisi’s own words afterwards, a period where “our lungs were pumping hard” and the All Blacks “came like a house on fire.” Then Savea’s shoulder went, and he was gone, and you could feel the whole contest tilt — not because New Zealand stopped, but because the one man carrying the thing on his back was suddenly on the bench with ice on him. That is not a joke. Rugby does not owe anybody a fair exit, and losing your captain mid-Test to an injury is the cruellest way this sport has of ending an argument.
New Zealand still would not lie down. Will Jordan restored the lead after the break with his 54th Test try, which is an obscene number for a man who still looks like he is on his way to a lecture. But Leroy Carter missed a tackle, Jesse Kriel went through the hole like the door had been left open, Malcolm Marx did the thing Malcolm Marx does — the maul, the inevitability, the slow-motion repossession of a nation’s property — and Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu landed the penalty that put the game beyond a single score. Samisoni Taukei’aho scored late. It counted for the scoreboard and nothing else. Four tries each, and South Africa won it in the places where tries are not scored: the scrum, the maul, the last twenty minutes, the bit where you find out what the squad is actually made of.
Kolisi has now won 55 Tests as Springbok captain. Fifty-five. No South African has ever won more. And when they put the microphone in front of him afterwards he did not talk about the record at all — he talked about the people. “We play for ourselves, for the Springboks, but most importantly, we play for the people of South Africa. We represent each and every single person here.” He called it a privilege, not pressure. In Soweto. On the night the debt got paid. You can keep your marketing budget and your four-year alternating-host commercial cycle; that sentence in that stadium is the actual product.
So the series is 2–1, and the whole thing now flies eleven thousand kilometres to a football stadium in Baltimore on Saturday, where the All Blacks must win to square it and South Africa can end it 3–1 and go home with the first edition of Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry in the cabinet. America is going to get its first ever look at this fixture live. They are going to see the haka, they are going to see the bomb squad, they are going to ask why a man is allowed to jump on another man’s shoulders, and somewhere in the second half they are going to see a scrum reset four times and wonder what on earth is happening.
Dave, if you are reading — and we suspect the feedback process has a Google Alert — the Springboks will bring the same scrum to Baltimore. Straight, legal, and available for inspection from any angle you like. It is not walking around. It is just walking forward, and taking eight New Zealanders with it, and occasionally scoring seven points on its own. 😭🇿🇦