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Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry prediction: Springboks to level the series with ugly win as spoiled fly-half plan puts All Blacks scrum in the spotlight Rassie Erasmus answered a five-try defeat with six changes to his matchday squad, a restored Handre Pollard and the most experienced side South Africa have ever named. Then a calf injury took his fly-half away on the day before the match. The top line Erasmus spent Monday fixing his backline and then promptly spent Friday morning watching the fix fall over. Pollard is out with a calf, so Sacha Feinberg-Mngomzeulu, dropped four days ago for a performance nobody in the Bok camp troubled themselves to defend, walks straight back into the 10 shirt. Manie Libbok, who wasn’t in the 23 at all on Monday, comes onto the bench to cover him. And Cheslin Kolbe, ruled out earlier in the week with the niggle he took at Ellis Park, is passed fit and starts on the right, with Kurt-Lee Arendse dropping out and Ethan Hooker keeping the left wing, presumably to shore up the goal-kicking duties. We made the point here on Sunday that South Africa‘s trouble at Ellis Park wasn’t really about who was picked; it was about how slowly they were getting the ball away, and you don’t fix four and a half seconds at the ruck by changing your half-backs. Erasmus changed them anyway, and he’s now lost one of them on the eve of the match, which leaves Thomas du Toit’s promotion to the bench as the only real thing he did all week that goes anywhere near the actual problem. The rest of it stands. Cobus Reinach starts at nine for the injured Grant Williams, Siya Kolisi has come through two full-pace sessions on the hamstring he picked up against Argentina and takes the captaincy back, which relieves Pieter-Steph du Toit of the armband in the week he becomes the 11th Springbok to reach 100 caps. Ox Nché wins his 50th, Eben Etzebeth extends his own record to 144, and with Kolisi in the six jersey the starting XV carries 964 Test caps. New Zealand, meanwhile, have barely moved anything around, other than things enforced by injury. Ethan de Groot and Josh Lord clashed heads late in the first half at Ellis Park and are both inside World Rugby’s 12-day stand-down, so George Bower goes from bench to loosehead and Tupou Vaa’i shifts from blindside to lock alongside Fabian Holland, with Simon Parker taking the six shirt, a surprising selection given Ethan Blackadder’s superb form against the Lions; the only selection Dave Rennie actually chose to make was swapping Leroy Carter and Josh Moorby between the 11 and the 23. Anton Segner’s tour is over with the Achilles he picked up against the Bulls, Patrick Tuipulotu and Xavier Numia come onto the bench, and a side unbeaten in seven under Rennie is otherwise left exactly where it was. Where the game will be won South Africa have averaged five and a half points per entry into the opposition 22 across this season. At Ellis Park they got 0.9. New Zealand got 3.7, and our own count to the 64th minute had the hosts on nine entries at 1.1 against six at 4.3. Those are not the numbers of a side that was outplayed; rather, they’re the numbers of a side that arrived and then couldn’t finish, and if you’re asking which of those is harder to put right inside six days, it isn’t the first one. The mechanism behind it is recycle speed, and it didn’t change when the scoreboard stopped rewarding them; South Africa recycled at 4.4 seconds to New Zealand’s 3.1, nearly exactly the gap that has been there all summer, and inside the 22 they slowed to just under six. Between halfway and the opposition 22 that costs a side very little, because the defence in front of them still has ground to concede and a fold to complete. Inside the 22 there is no ground left to give up, so the line presses off its own goal line, and the extra second and a bit is precisely the time a scrambling defence needs to reset its numbers. It is also, as Erasmus found out to his cost, the time a defender needs to get a hand on the ball. No fly-half makes a ruck faster. What Pollard was picked to do was take the three, and after the 55th minute at Ellis Park, five metres out and 19-16 down, when Erasmus went to the scrum rather than the posts and Matthew Carley penalised the Springboks at it, that was the decision the evening turned on. Erasmus has said since that the suggestion should probably have been to take the points. So ask the question that matters. On 75 minutes, in the rain, three down and five out, does Feinberg-Mngomezulu go to the posts? On last Saturday’s evidence, he doesn’t, and that is the whole of it. Then there’s the weather, and this is where Saturday is genuinely different from last Saturday. Rain at sea level takes away a good deal of what New Zealand did to South Africa in Johannesburg, because you can’t strip a ball in contact that nobody is carrying into contact, and it puts the evening back into the air, which is the one contest the Boks won outright at Ellis Park and then did precisely nothing with. Contestables and reclaims are the currency of a wet Test now, and here Kolbe’s return matters a great deal more than the change at 10; he takes the goal-kicking, he competes in the air far above his size, and he gives Feinberg-Mngomzeulu somewhere to kick rather than a problem to solve on his own, with Hooker chasing alongside him and Damian Willemse and Kolisi behind them to gather what comes back. Damian McKenzie and Carter have to take it coming down. One correction needs carrying forward on the scrum, because a fair amount of the reporting this week still has it wrong. The Springbok scrum did not lose its power when Nché came off. Gerhard Steenekamp replaced him around the 45th minute, won a penalty with his first scrum and another with his next. The fall-off came in the final quarter, when Steenekamp went off around 66 minutes and Jan-Hendrik Wessels came on, a hooker covering loosehead off a six-two bench, asked to hold a Test scrum at altitude against a front-row that was by then entirely fresh. Wessels is out of the 23 this week and Thomas du Toit is in behind Steenekamp. With Pollard gone, that is the only one of Monday’s decisions still standing. And discipline, because the 13-man period, although when the game was already lost, was wholly self-inflicted. Marco van Staden went for an illegal cleanout and Reinach for a deliberate knock-on within a minute of one another, and Reinach now starts at scrum-half. The officiating picture shifted on Thursday too, with Nika Amashukeli withdrawn through ‘flu and Angus Gardner moved up from the third Test to take Cape Town, the two of them effectively swapping fixtures so that Amashukeli has Soweto on 5 September. The All Blacks have won 13 of the 16 Tests Gardner has refereed. What they said Rennie has been careful all week, which is what you’d expect of a coach four Tests into the job who has just won at Ellis Park and knows exactly what usually happens next in this country. He was happy enough, he said, but “I think both teams will be better this weekend”, and he keeps returning to a group he describes as still growing. Erasmus has spent the week auditing himself instead, and there hasn’t been a word about the officials, even though one or two marginal calls went against him. “We have regrouped and identified the areas of our game we need to fix,” he said, and nearly two days after the final whistle he was still describing himself and the squad as irritated and frustrated. On Kolisi, once the hamstring had come through two sessions at full pace, he was flat about it: “Siya is 100%. He’ll be starting.” Ardie Savea ‘very lucky’ as Nigel Owens weighs into controversial Springboks v All Blacks incident Everything he said about his fly-half, though, now reads back as an argument against the side he’s been left with. He went with the record, saying Pollard has always been a man who’s done it for the Boks, and he explained that Pollard’s familiarity with Cape Town and his kicking carried added value on a night that was probably going to be wet. He also said, in as many words, that Kolbe being ruled out was part of why he went to Pollard rather than Libbok. By Friday morning Kolbe was fit and Pollard wasn’t. Not one line of that reasoning survives. From the other side of the fence, Sir Steve Hansen has spent the week telling his old side they’re in a position to win the series but will have to get desperate to do it. Players to watch Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, back in the shirt through no doing of his own. He was playing only his second match after injury at Ellis Park and it showed, in the restart that went dead, in the ball he threw away and in the decisions that never came off, and there were moments in that second half that would qualify as coach killers in any changing room in the world. Six days later he has 80 minutes in the rain to answer for all of it in a Test South Africa cannot lose. Very few players are handed that. Cheslin Kolbe, back sooner than anybody expected and, given the forecast, arguably the most valuable man on either sheet. He kicks the goals and he contests in the air better for his size than anybody in the game. Ethan Hooker keeps the left wing with Will Jordan opposite him, and Kolbe’s return has changed his job entirely. He’s not the replacement for an injured star any more, he’s the other half of the chase, and what he wins back or forces into touch will do more to decide where this Test is played than anything South Africa manage with ball in hand. George Bower, 34, promoted from the bench, and the man whose arrival steadied a New Zealand scrum that had been running at a 57 per cent success rate on its own put-in. Rennie needs that from the first minute now rather than the 40th, against Nché, Malcolm Marx and Wilco Louw. Deon Fourie, a month short of his 40th birthday, on the bench in his own city and set to become the oldest Springbok in history if he gets on. Erasmus has been candid that Fourie isn’t match fit, and explained the selection by way of a list he keeps on his laptop of tried and tested players who are older or more injury-prone. He covers hooker, both flanks and eighth man, which is exactly why he’s there. But the world champions answering a five-try defeat by recalling a 39-year-old their own coach says is short of a game tells you plenty about how thin the middle of that squad has become. Main head-to-head Ox Nché, Marx and Louw put the New Zealand front-row through something close to a demolition for 54 minutes at Ellis Park. All of that dominance bought South Africa three penalty goals. Louw won the first scrum penalty of the night with his second scrum after 26 minutes, and Nché won one with his third just after the half-hour, and Lomax stayed out there through all of it, took the worst of it, and was still standing when Jacobson scored off the base of a five-metre scrum on 59 minutes. Nché reaches 50 caps on Saturday, at sea level, in conditions that ought to make his scrum the most valuable thing on the park. Nché’s hip flexibility, his timing and his lack of inches, creating an ability to get under any tighthead, is almost definitive in the history of scrummaging. His problem isn’t Tyrel Lomax at his best, it’s the 66th minute, because that is when this pack fell away last week and that is the hour Erasmus has rebuilt his bench to survive. Steenekamp and Thomas du Toit are a considerably more serious pair of replacements than Steenekamp and Wessels, and with the fly-half plan gone, that front-row plan is carrying a good deal more of the evening than it was ever meant to. Prediction New Zealand were the better side in Johannesburg and deserved the margin, but they were handed a good deal of it, and almost none of what went wrong for South Africa was structural. They led the penalty count 14-10, had 61 per cent of the territory and won the set-piece. A side that leads all three and loses by 17 hasn’t been beaten by the referee or by luck; it’s been beaten by 23 turnovers and a tackle completion of 78 per cent. Want more from Planet Rugby? Add us as a preferred source on Google to your favourites list for world-class coverage you can trust. Those are fixable in a week, particularly by this coach, and the weather is doing a fair amount of the fixing for him. Losing Pollard on the morning before the match costs them the control and the temperament in a Test that will come down to two or three decisions inside the 22, but getting Kolbe back mitigates a good deal of it, because the goal-kicking returns and a wet night is decided in the air. Take away the ball-strip in contact, put the game up there, give the Boks a front-row that can still scrummage in the last quarter, and the pattern that beat them at Ellis Park doesn’t repeat itself in the same way at DHL Stadium, a ground where South Africa have lost once, to the Lions in 2021. South Africa by five. 22-17, and the aerial game is our reason for it. It won’t be pretty, but it’ll be mightily effective, precisely what the Springboks need at this moment in time. The teams South Africa: 15 Damian Willemse, 14 Cheslin Kolbe, 13 Jesse Kriel, 12 Damian de Allende, 11 Ethan Hooker, 10 Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, 9 Cobus Reinach, 8 Jasper Wiese, 7 Pieter-Steph du Toit, 6 Siya Kolisi (c), 5 Ruan Nortje, 4 Eben Etzebeth, 3 Wilco Louw, 2 Malcolm Marx, 1 Ox Nché Replacements: 16 Deon Fourie, 17 Gerhard Steenekamp, 18 Thomas du Toit, 19 Lood de Jager, 20 Andre Esterhuizen, 21 Cameron Hanekom, 22 Morne van den Berg, 23 Manie Libbok New Zealand: 15 Damian McKenzie, 14 Will Jordan, 13 Quinn Tupaea, 12 Jordie Barrett, 11 Leroy Carter, 10 Ruben Love, 9 Cam Roigard, 8 Ardie Savea (c), 7 Luke Jacobson, 6 Simon Parker, 5 Tupou Vaa’i, 4 Fabian Holland, 3 Tyrel Lomax, 2 Codie Taylor, 1 George Bower Replacements: 16 Asafo Aumua, 17 Xavier Numia, 18 Fletcher Newell, 19 Patrick Tuipulotu, 20 Peter Lakai, 21 Kyle Preston, 22 Anton Lienert-Brown, 23 Josh Moorby Date: Saturday, 29 August, 2026 Venue: DHL Stadium, Cape Town Kick-off: 17:10 (local SAST), 16:10 (UK), 17:10 (France), 17:10 (South Africa), 01:10 (23 August, AEST), 03:10 (23 August, New Zealand), 12:10 (Argentina), 00:10 (23 August, JST), 11:10 (EDT) Referee: Angus Gardner (RA) Assistant Referees: Karl Dickson (RFU), Sam Grove-White (Scotland) TMO: Brett Cronan (Australia) FPRO: Eric Gauzins (FFR)