A 17-10 win that felt like doing your taxes with your fists. The world champions flew to Buenos Aires, met an Argentina side snarling like a dog that’s been told the postman is inside the house, and had to scrap for every metre as if the grass owed them money. Nothing flowed. Nothing was pretty. And somehow — as is the Springbok way — the scoreboard still ended up green.
The one moment of actual silk came right before the break: quick hands, a clever line, and Edwill van der Merwe gliding over in the 39th minute to remind everyone the Boks can, when they feel like it, play like a jazz band and not just a moving wall. For long stretches after that it was trench warfare, the kind of Test where you win the collisions, lose your voice, and gain three grey hairs per ruck.
Then up popped Cameron Hanekom in the 63rd, because this Springbok forward pack has a lovely habit of producing a match-winning try at exactly the moment the whole nation has started pacing the lounge. From there it was cling-on time: Argentina huffed, puffed, and threw everything at the door until the 83rd minute, and the Boks simply refused to let it open. Ugly. Effective. Deeply, spiritually South African.
The context is what makes it delicious. Rassie Erasmus is not playing draughts, he’s playing 4D chess in the dark — blooding depth, rotating a squad, and squeezing a hard away win out of a night where, in his own camp’s words, nothing was working. You do not want to be the team that meets a Bok side that just won badly. A Bok side that wins ugly is a Bok side still finding its top gear, and its top gear is currently parked in Johannesburg waiting for the All Blacks.
Because that’s the punchline: this was the warm-up. The main event is four Tests against New Zealand, who are already in the country making themselves comfortable. The Boks answered the Buenos Aires question — can you win when it’s horrible? — with a grim, gritted-teeth yes. The next question wears black, and it’s knocking on the front door as we speak.