After four Tests against a Springboks team that is becoming one of the greatest of all time, All black people they have learned that their greatest weakness is that they have lost the art of applying pressure.
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When they were the game’s leading team and chasing greatness between 2010 and 2019. South Africa Now the All Blacks knew how to build and maintain pressure on their opposition by repeating moments of calm, precise and disciplined play.
The passes would go to the hand, the lines would be straight, the scrums solid, the clearances technically perfect, the discipline impeccable, the shots would be found and there would be no way to get the opposing teams out of the bear hug.
They would be pressed into submission; broken along the way New Zealand he would turn the crank, play by play, until it was inevitable that something had to give.
It was the excellence of the arms in that golden age – as it is now for the Springboks. But throughout Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry series, these 2026 All Blacks could not, or at least rarely, showed they had the patience, precision and discipline to produce big, back-to-back moments to build the pressure on South Africa until they broke.
The penalty total in the four Tests shows the All Blacks conceded 44 to the Springboks’ 36, but that number doesn’t tell the whole story of how ill-discipline hurt New Zealand.
Of those 44 penalties, too many were what coaches would call “soft” or “stupid” – unnecessary actions that served no purpose. In the final Test in Baltimore, Tupou Vaa’i was penalized for holding Cameron Hanekom’s leg in a difficult situation and the back line was pinged in the first minute for offside.
In other Tests there were penalties for clearing players behind the hands, interfering with kick-offs and addressing the referee.
These acts of ill-discipline often came at critical moments – when the All Blacks were building momentum and starting to put the Boks under pressure.
All three coaches emphasized to their players that discipline is critical, but behavior does not change. So is there some deeper fault plaguing the All Blacks?
It’s tempting to call them brain explosions, but they actually pointed to something deeper: an endemic flaw in New Zealand’s rugby system that doesn’t prevent ill-discipline and perhaps even encourages players to try their luck to see what they can get away with.
Poor discipline, after all, was a feature during the Ian Foster era from 2020 to 2023, as it was during Scott Robertson’s two years in charge between 2024 and 2025, as it is now under Dave Rennie.
All three coaches emphasized to their players that discipline is critical, but behavior does not change. So is there some deeper fault plaguing the All Blacks?
“I wonder if there’s always a lot of refereeing in Super Rugby,” said Rennie, when asked if there was an institutionalized problem with discipline.
“You come to international matches and you have referees who are quite firm in that area. But we have to take responsibility for that.”
“At the start of the game, we’re offside at the kick-off. When you have referees who, especially the English, are very technical, they will try to set up the game and choose things like not to roll and not to roll early. So we have to be smart about that.
“There is no excuse. We have to do better. We cannot give teams like South Africa a soft entry through soft penalties.
“That will definitely be a focus for us and it is. I think the penalty count was 10 tonight (Baltimore), which is not a big number. We don’t want to be zero because we want to push the boundaries.”
The All Blacks kicked just one penalty on goal – and missed it – while South Africa kicked nine of the 10 – 27 points they used to build pressure.
It wasn’t just bad discipline, however, that momentum for the All Blacks. In Baltimore, Richie Mo’unga missed a penalty for a touch, there were lineouts and a scrum penalty – all of which meant New Zealand didn’t put South Africa under the same intensity of pressure.
They couldn’t build pressure to the point where they kept the scoreboard ticking to the extent that they probably could have, when other metrics like line breaks and beaten defenders are taken into account.
Also, the All Blacks took just one penalty on goal – and missed it – while South Africa kicked nine of the 10 – 27 points they used to build pressure.
The one time in the series when the All Blacks put together back-to-back big moments was in the final 25 minutes at Ellis Park, when they won an unexpected penalty in their own 22 to ease the pressure.
Then Quinn Tupaea took a smart 50-22. A tight scramble allowed Ardie Savea to set up a try for Luke Jacobson and from there – after leading 26-16 with 15 behind, they played in the right parts of the field and let South Africa implode with two yellow cards paving the way for two more tries.
It was a perfect example of how to force an opponent into submission – but for the rest of the series it was the Springboks.
As Rennie summed it up after a 43-28 loss in Baltimore, a game that really hung in the balance with 10 minutes left: “There’s a lot of good things. I think the guys showed a lot of grit on defense and a lot of fight.
“I think offensively, when we’re patient and accurate, we’ve scored 17 tries in the series. So that tells you that when we’re good, we’re a handful. But we made too many mistakes tonight. They took a couple of balls out of our hands.
“But in the end, it hurt us a little bit because we just couldn’t press long enough. It’s a little bit about the balance of our game. We’ve played pretty well on this tour.”
“We didn’t shoot that well tonight. We just weren’t competitive enough and we gave them too much space. They were pretty lethal.”
The big mystery of the last few years has been why New Zealand aren’t better at returning the high ball, as that seems to be a skill set that should be in their wheelhouse.
Die-hard analysts will say this is all academic – that discipline clearances, lineout wins, touch kicks and touchdown penalties would not have made a critical difference when South Africa had such superiority in scrums, mauls, aerials and turnovers.
There is no doubt that the All Blacks must improve in all four of those areas to be globally competitive at the highest level.
As for the top two, the return of Tamaiti Williams will undoubtedly help as he will give the All Blacks another power and depth in the loose that they didn’t have in South Africa.
Not everyone will agree, but the return of Scott Barrett will also be a big boost in both areas, as well as giving the All Blacks another ball carrier.
The big mystery of the last few years has been why New Zealand aren’t better at returning the high ball, as that seems to be a skill set that should be in their wheelhouse.
They came up with a plan to use the trailing wing as a scavenger and try to group bodies at the back to clear the scraps, but the Boks were able to either beat them in the air and get a clean catch or get in between the trailing wing and wait for the fullback.
Arguably, coming out on the wrong side of the kicking statistics hurt the All Blacks more throughout the series than the battle did. This allowed South Africa to retain the ball for longer periods and progress up the field.
But still, while there’s no doubt the All Blacks were hurt by South Africa’s scrum, maul, kicking game and turnover, they were hurt more by their own inability to build those pressure sequences.
“It’s literally the difference between winning and losing,” All Blacks No.10 Mo’ung said in Baltimore of the Springboks’ ability to string together big moments.
“If you’re able to build momentum and build pressure and put those moments together, we’ve seen when that happens we get rewards, but (sometimes there’s) a soft penalty or we don’t get the rebound we want.”
As for how to solve the problem, Mo’unga believes the answer will lie on both sides of the ball.
“I think there’s going to be a really good conversation about ‘how do we build pressure?'” he said. “I think we’ve seen what we can do with the ball, but maybe what we can do without the ball. What does our defense look like and how do we really stifle them in their own half?”
