New Zealand in The Rugby Championship: A history of friendly draws

Why there’s an asterisk on a whole string of All Black wins in the southern hemisphere rugby competition

It’s hard to believe that we’re only a couple of years away from celebrating 30 years of The Rugby Championship.

A surprising number of South Africans are blinded by the euphoria around our country’s World Cup successes and are only dimly aware of what the Springboks get up to in a regular year. That’s a shame because I believe winning The Rugby Championship has to be worth at least the same bragging rights as an RWC triumph.  

The Rugby Championship, launched in 1996 as the Tri Nations contested by Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, has always involved travelling vast distances across multiple time zones. That doesn’t happen at World Cups.

Photo source: @springboks on Twitter

But more important by far is the truth that the world’s most consistently good rugby team, typically dressed in black, will be standing in your way each and every edition. Unlike Six Nations countries, which tend to have their peaks and troughs, New Zealand never goes away. Over nearly three decades, they’ve won almost three-quarters of the southern hemisphere titles.

Unless it’s an RWC year, when the schedule gets reduced, you’ll be playing New Zealand twice. There was even a period, not long before Argentina joined and made it a four-team tournament, when everybody played everyone thrice.

Consider for a moment that South Africa have won one of their four World Cups without facing New Zealand at all – and got away with losing to them on their way to another. Australia dodged the Kiwis in their 1999 RWC victory. Well, there’s no sidestepping the All Blacks in the Rugby Championship.

Yep, you’re going to need at least one victory over the Kiwis to win the Rugby Championship silverware. But even then there’s their habit of striking back in devastating fashion from the odd slip-up. It means that your hard-earned win over them all but destroys the chances of somebody else taking points off them afterwards. And even if you share the honours with them and you both win all your other games, you’ll have to match their bonus-point prowess throughout the tournament.

How likely is that? The very fact that it isn’t a World Cup and isn’t strictly knockout also provides a tiny little pressure vent for all concerned. So, while you might be able to hope for an All Black choke in the pressure-cooker of a tight do-or-die RWC clash, that has always been less likely in a league system offering bonus points and in which a riskier brand of rugby backfiring won’t bring four years of regret.

Not an easy ask, is it? The fact that South Africa have won as many annual Rugby Championship titles (I’m also counting Tri Nations success for this comparison) as quadrennial World Cups (four), and Australia only twice as many (also four), reveals as much. New Zealand, by contrast, have been serial winners of the southern hemisphere tournament, lifting the silverware 20 times compared to three Rugby World Cups.

I’m not sure enough rugby people have stopped to think about whether anything other than perennial All Black dominance has helped make that statistic as skew as it is.

I’ve thought about it a lot. No question, New Zealand have been the best team for most of the tournament’s history, and deserve to have won the most titles. But that many more? Has anything systemic tipped some of the close ones in their favour? I’ve long had a little theory on that. One that sounds a lot like sore losing, I’ll confess. But the start of this year’s tournament has convinced me it’s worth sharing at exactly this point.

Things look better than usual for the Springboks after the first two rounds, don’t they? And what do we note about those opening rounds? Well, South Africa opened up with back-to-back Australia fixtures for the first time since the tournament expanded to four teams twelve years ago.

It may be a little piece of fixtures trivia, but it’s one that tempts me to see some of that historic All Black dominance in a different light.

Bledisloe springboard skewed The Rugby Championship for years

For me, the opening two rounds of this year’s Rugby Championship have highlighted what I’ve long suspected: The All Blacks had a particularly favourable draw throughout a long chunk of the tournament’s history.

Disregarding 2015 – another World Cup year – every edition of the Rugby Championship from Argentina’s arrival in 2012 until 2019 kicked off with a pair of Trans-Tasman contests. The All Blacks won every title in those seven years. And here’s my hypothesis: that was not a co-incidence.

The Wallabies have long been notoriously slow starters in this competition. You may put that down to the Kiwis making them look that way, of course. But now that South Africa have finally had a chance to open their campaign against the men in gold, we may make a comparison. Results in Brisbane and Perth – the former venue actually a bogey ground for the Springboks – suggest there’s a material benefit for anybody getting the Wallabies first and milking (bonus) points. Just like New Zealand did in all those years.

While the Kiwis got off to a flyer in all of those campaigns, South Africa routinely opened up with a couple of Argentina encounters. While this doesn’t look an unfriendly draw either, we should remember that Los Pumas are usually the opposite of the Wallabies: they start well but can’t sustain the intensity over a full campaign. If they’re going to produce an upset, it’s likely to occur in the first half of the tournament. We’ve already seen that this year, when they felled the AB’s on the opening day before round two showed they had emptied their tanks. Likewise, their brilliance against Australia and New Zealand in 2022 came in the first half of their campaign. And their 2020 ‘Covid win’ against the Kiwis was their first fixture of that tournament.

If Argentina don’t beat you up front, there’s every chance they’ll at least deny you a bonus point – a Bok bugbear in so many editions. By the end of the league, though, not even home advantage could cancel out the effects of fading performance. And who usually travelled to South America for the penultimate round in every one of those winning years? You guessed it…

Meanwhile, South Africa would always meet Australia after the Wallabies had had a wake-up call or two from the All Blacks. The Aussies would at times provide resistance that had been unimaginable on the opening weekend. Often enough to repel the Boks entirely, at least in Australia.

This time around, Australia will face the Kiwis at the very end. How much will Joe Schmidt have worked out by then? Maybe not enough to reclaim that big old trophy some of the younger squad members have only ever seen in photographs…but can they run them close instead of handing them bonus points on a platter?

Maybe I’m reading too much into the first two weekends. Maybe the results we saw were purely a reflection of who’s where in world rugby rather than who played whom when. Maybe I’m too keen to find evidence for rewriting southern hemisphere rugby history.

But isn’t it nice to have a new dynamic and narrative anyway? The next round will see the effective ‘finals’ being played out as the Boks take on the All Blacks in South Africa twice, and the fact that the hosts don’t need to chase bonus points makes it all the more mouthwatering. May the best team win the latest edition of global rugby’s most precious rivalry.

This is the second manifestation of the new ‘non-RWC year’ structure the tournament finally took on in 2022, following that rather repetitive 2012-19 period and a couple of years of pandemic silliness. That year, we began with the Springboks playing the All Blacks and the Aussies facing Argentina. It was something new as far as the draw was concerned. And after some rocking and rolling, the Kiwis only edged it by a single bonus point.

Ideally, the Springboks will proceed to bear out my theory by winning this year’s title after finally getting that friendly draw the All Blacks enjoyed from 2012-19. If that happens, I’d say we have a stronger case for sticking an asterisk next to those seven All Black Rugby Championship wins in eight years…

For a tongue-in-cheek take on how the 2022 Rugby Championship played out, click here to read Jacques Nienaber’s frustration that Australia can’t be counted upon to take points off New Zealand any more.

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