Rugby’s fiercest rivalry is back. When the Springboks and New Zealand’s All Blacks take to the field at Joburg’s Ellis Park on Saturday, it’s a century-old story of dominance, identity and mutual respect again coming to life.
The first game has Bok supporters across the country in a heightened state of anxiety. The FM team knows many devout fans who are on a knife edge about Siya Kolisi’s men trouncing their arch antipodean rivals.
Ahead of the match, sports scientist Ross Tucker and sports psychologist Henning Gericke unpack why no other fixture in rugby carries quite the same weight.
A long history
Tucker says the statistics tell their own story. Facing each other in test matches, the All Blacks have won 63 games — by far the most of any rugby-playing nation. South Africa sits in second place at 43, with four draws.
Between them, the two nations have won seven of the past 10 Rugby World Cups, numbers Tucker argues confirm they are comfortably the two dominant forces in the sport. So we perform worse against each other than against the rest of the world or relative to our overall records, he adds.
Head-to-head, the picture has shifted over time.
Gericke, who worked full-time with the Springboks from 2004 to 2007 under coach Jake White, including the 2007 World Cup-winning campaign in Paris, adds context: South Africa actually held the head-to-head edge for much of the rivalry’s early history, before New Zealand pulled ahead through the 1990s and 2000s.
In the past five years, that balance has tightened again as the Springboks reclaimed their status as world champions. For decades, though, beating the All Blacks away from home was rare enough to be considered a badge of honour — the kind of one-off result that ranks among the Springboks’ greatest achievements.
The teams first met at the start of the 20th century, but Gericke points to the 1937 tour, when the Springboks sailed to New Zealand and won the series, as the moment that gave the competition its lasting character.
Given the enormous time difference, South African fans following on the radio often woke in the early hours to catch the action. “We’ve been brought up with that tradition,” Gericke says. “This romantic side, but also this fierce competition. We respect one another so much because we know a Test against New Zealand is the real test.”
No single moment, say experts, shaped the modern rivalry as much as the 1995 World Cup final on home soil. South Africa’s first tournament back on the international stage ended with the Springboks beating an “invincible” All Blacks side, a result Tucker calls the moment that crystallised the rivalry for a generation of fans. It also announced Jonah Lomu and Christian Cullen to the world as players who brought a new level of skill and unpredictability to the game.
The big moment
The 1995 World Cup reintroduced South African rugby on the World Cup stage, “because we had not played one until then”. There was Nelson Mandela, Francois Pienaar, Chester Williams, Joel Stransky, Joost van der Westhuizen and James Small. Add in a Hollywood blockbuster starring Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman about the moment and the dynamic came into even sharper focus.
For Gericke, what stood out was less the result than what followed. “Even though the All Blacks lost, the respect they showed us was incredible,” he says. “I sometimes think they understood what it meant for us maybe even more than we did ourselves.”
Since 1995, the two nations have traded periods of dominance, but the All Blacks have remained the standard against which Springbok success is measured. As Tucker puts it: New Zealand was the one team South Africa couldn’t consistently beat — and when you’re the emerging number two, the number one defines you.
Part of what makes the rivalry so compelling is the contrast in how the two nations play. SA rugby has traditionally been built around forward dominance, physicality, and set-piece control. The All Blacks, by contrast, have long been the game’s “flair team” — producing individual mavericks capable of turning a match on their own, a lineage running from Lomu and Cullen through Dan Carter, Conrad Smith and Ma’a Nonu.
Gericke credits that identity partly to New Zealand’s refusal to play conservatively. “They want to score tries. The whole brand, the whole vibe around the team and the country — that attracts people to the way they play.”
Both men see the same obsession underpinning the sport in each country, even if it shows up differently: jerseys in shop windows in Wellington and Auckland, political fallout when the All Blacks lose, a Springbok side that has become, in Gericke’s words, “not just a rugby player” for those who make it, but a symbol of something larger. “For them, rugby is a way of life, not just a game,” Gericke says. “It’s the same in both countries. When those two teams come together, everything intensifies.”
The school pool
Unlike the northern hemisphere, where development runs through club academies, both nations funnel talent through school systems. Tucker compares it to American high-school football culture, where certain schools become factories for professional-grade talent generation after generation.
In South Africa, institutions like Grey College and Paarl Boys’ High look at players as young as primary-school age, sometimes recruiting on the strength of a father’s rugby pedigree, with professional contracts dangled in front of teenagers.
Tucker is candid that this isn’t necessarily healthy. He calls it a version of the “head start fallacy” (the false belief that early specialisation permanently determines long-term success), but acknowledges it’s deeply embedded in South African rugby culture.
By his estimate, around 200 schools produce about 4,000 boys a year who dream of becoming Springboks. Only two or three a year actually make it: “the most aggressive game of musical chairs in the world”, as it has been described by another sports scientist he knows — 500 hopefuls, one green-and-gold jersey.
Gericke, who has since consulted with players at the Bulls and previously the Stormers, sees mental resilience as the true dividing line for those who break through. “There’s a lot of talent in South Africa, but only a few make it, because it takes a particular inner makeup,” he says. “You’re going to face injuries, setbacks, times when things don’t go smoothly. You need real belief in yourself, because not everyone is always going to back you.”
He points to self-image, rather than confidence alone, as the real foundation. “Confidence can come and go. But if you have a good self-image, if you know you belong, that you’re more than just a rugby player, then your confidence can grow from that.”
Tucker adds a structural factor unique to the two nations: their unusually dense, interconnected rugby communities. He quips that most South Africans are only two or three degrees of separation from a Springbok — a closeness he believes is largely unique to South Africa and New Zealand among the major rugby nations, and one that helps explain the sport’s almost obsessive grip on both countries.
Playing politics
The rivalry’s roots run through some of the most fraught politics of the 20th century.
During apartheid, New Zealand was the only country that continued to play Test rugby against South Africa — a stance that made the All Blacks unpopular among most anti-apartheid activists. However, the team retained significant sympathy, particularly within Cape Town’s coloured community, a link traced partly to the 1981 tour protests, including the famous incident in which an activist pilot dropped flour bombs, flares and leaflets on a Test match from a light aircraft. It became known as the “flour bomb Test”.
Some trace the sympathy to a felt kinship between disenfranchised communities in South Africa and New Zealand’s Māori population — two historically marginalised groups — and credit much of the All Blacks’ celebrated flair and style to Māori influence on the way New Zealand plays.
In Tucker’s view, South Africa and New Zealand may be the two most diverse, heterogeneous rugby-playing nations in the world, which only deepens the sense of mutual recognition between them.
Gericke sees that recognition as central to the fixture’s meaning today. “New Zealand is actually the enemy in a good way — the giant we need to fashion ourselves against, the team we need to beat,” he says. “That’s part of South African culture, and it’s part of New Zealand’s culture too.” He also points to New Zealand’s deep talent pool, bolstered by players of Tongan, Fijian and Samoan heritage, a national obsession that runs through daily life.
Gericke believes the rivalry has taken on renewed significance this year with the return of a full New Zealand tour of South Africa, including matches against provincial sides such as Western Province and the Bulls, in a format not seen for decades. “I think the last full tour like this was back in the 1970s,” he says. “Now they’re spending six or seven weeks in South Africa. That brings back a history we haven’t had in years, and it’s given the whole rivalry a psychological lift beyond just the Test matches.”
He also sees the current era reflecting a broader shift in South African rugby and society. Where the national team was once a source of division, Gericke describes a squad now drawn “from different cultures, different places” that has become a unifying symbol for the country, even as pockets of old allegiance to touring sides linger as a reminder of the sport’s complicated past. “I see people saying, ‘come on, get behind the team’, South Africa has become one country now,” he says. “That’s still part of the journey, but it shows you the intensity that exists around this rivalry.”
For Gericke, the deeper question — why a sporting rivalry becomes bound up with national identity — comes back to resilience. “We’re a country that’s been through a lot, and we still have plenty of problems we’re trying to work through,” he says. “The team represents standing together, dealing with adversity, and celebrating together. That becomes part of who we identify with. People want to support winners — people who fight, who stand together.”
This powerful intersection of the cultural, the psychological, the physical and the political is why the Boks and All Blacks can turn 80 minutes on an average Saturday into something approaching a national reckoning.
