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If you want to explain Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu to someone who has never seen him play, you could do worse than sit them down in front of Saturday’s test in Turin. Start at the ninth minute. There’s a dummy that will make Giacomo Nicotero and Alessandro Fusco hesitate, a step between them and then that sudden, startling change of pace. Forty meters later, he leaps to drop the ball one-handed into the corner.
Keep watching and you’ll see him spill the ball twice without pressure. Same guy. Same afternoon. For all those rough edges, he still walked away with 26 points.
In between it was 50-22. Italy had just given way to Malcolm Marx and set off, hoping to drive the Springboks into his own half. Feinberg-Mngomezulu sent the ball the other way, dropped it down the field and watched it skip into touch inside the Italian 22. Then he puffed his lips and twirled his finger around as if the whole world was a piece of string under his command. Cocky? Of course. He was celebrating a touchdown before his forwards had even formed a line. They won it and Siya Kolisi scored. If you’re going to celebrate early, it helps to have the Springbok pack in front of you.
Later, his instrumented gum guard prompted a head injury assessment and Damian Willemse came on to replace him. As Feinberg-Mngomezulu left, he appeared to empty his own Stormers teammate. Did he despise him? Some on social media took it as further evidence of an attitude problem.
I saw an amazing fly half who hated to be sent out of the game he was tearing up. If you already think he’s a ‘windgat’ upstart who can’t stand someone else being the center of attention, you’ve probably seen someone being a jerk to his girlfriend. That’s a lot of character analysis to squeeze out of a few seconds of television.
The passage I keep coming back to is that punch and what followed. Imagine you are an Italian striker. You just peeled yourself off the turf after failing to stop a maul. You return to the halfway point, watch the sail restart down the field and start running. Seconds later you’re heading back towards your line to do the whole damn thing again. That was the feeling of the first half in Turin. The bottle green tidal wave you could see coming from the top row of the Allianz Stadium. Until the 25th minute South Africa scored five tries. By halftime it was 45-0.
Italy entered the match in 11th place, ten places below the Boks, and were missing Michele Lamaro, Tommaso Menoncello and Juan Ignacio Brex. Their only win over South Africa came in Florence in 2016, when they won 20-18 against Allister Coetzee’s 57-point side. All black people in Durban and lost by 16 at Twickenham the week before. It was a poor Springbok team. Rassie Erasmus resisted the temptation to rotate. He picked Ox Nche, Marx, Kolisi and Pieter-Steph du Toit in the pack and Damian de Allende and Jesse Kriel in midfield. When Italy conceded an early penalty under their posts, the Boks took the three points.
If you want to know how seriously Erasmus took Italy, look at the team he named for France. Fourteen of the 15 who actually started in Turin have been named to start in Paris on Friday. The only change is where Wilco Louw swaps places with Thomas du Toit. Twenty-two of the 23rd matches are the same, with Cobus Reinach replacing Grant Williams on the bench. Erasmus said he wanted to “select a settled team for this game to build momentum in the competition”. A team good enough to go to the Stade de France was the team he thought Italy should face.
The sides covered 423 meters to Italy’s 203 with just 13 more carries. They made 12 clear breaks to two and scored three tries directly from mauls. Feinberg-Mngomezulu hit all ten shots on goal. Even with more time on the clock and already 52 points ahead, South Africa made a set move for Ethan Hooker to score a ninth try. The bonus point has long been secured. They had a scrum and a chance to score, so they did because that’s what ruthlessness looks like.
The second half was scrappier. The Italian scrum bought something and Federico Ruzza scored after an hour. “They made the most of their opportunities and caused us problems in the scrum,” Erasmus said. Man of the Match Morne van den Berg sounded almost pleased to have something to train with. “We’ve got a lot of room for improvement in our game, which is actually pretty exciting,” he said.
Feinberg-Mngomezulu called it a “reality check.” That’s quite a thing to hear from someone who so ostentatiously celebrated a touchdown. It’s the right thing for France to hear from the fly half of the team that just gave 66 points to the Test team. A player who can so obviously enjoy what he has done for Italy can also walk into the dressing room and feel there is more to it than that.
I hope he continues to celebrate such shots. His desire to steal the show fits a team that wants to dominate every Test they play. These Springboks are like Roman legionnaires. It is not enough to just tread the known world. They do it with outstretched chests and crooked smiles on their faces.
