Boks scale new heights in a year to savour

WHILE this was not a World Cup-winning year for the Springboks — and if there had been a World Cup, they would surely have won it — the year 2025 is right up there in their “best ever” category.

- MIKE GREENAWAY

If we include the warm-up match against the Barbarians, the Boks played 15 matches, losing just two for an 86% record. That is the best Springbok return in the modern era, but not the best in history.

In the first half of the 20th century, up to the famous 4-0 whitewash of the All Blacks in 1949, the Boks almost routinely finished the year unbeaten for a 100% record, but the issue is that they averaged just five Tests per year.

Maybe the best way to evaluate how good a year it was for Rassie Erasmus’s team is to gauge the international public reaction to their performances.

We know the Boks are never going to win popularity contests — for over 100 years they have been regarded as brutal Neanderthals, and it will take along time to rub out that cliché — but after Ireland had been obliterated in Dublin, every critic in the world agreed that there was a country mile between the Springboks and the rest.

By the end of the year, the grudging respect at the beginning of it for the back-to-back world champions had given way to sheer admiration, if not outright envy.

We even had severe Springbok critics in former Scotland coach Matt Williams and All Blacks legend Sir John Kirwan singing the Boks’ praises.

Over the course of a magnificent five-match rampage through Europe, the South Africans showed that they have added exhilarating backline play to bludgeoning power. It is a recipe that no team on the planet can live with when the Boks are in the mood.

What is worrying for the Boks’ rivals is how they finished the year compared to how they started it — they signed off with a stark revelation that there is much more to come. There are still almost two years to the 2027 World Cup, and the Boks can morph much further into the ultimate rugby machine.