The Black Ferns were slow leaving the pitch at half-time, but very quick coming back on to it once the break was over. With 40 minutes to play, the scores tied 10-10, and a spot in the semi-finals on the line, the New Zealand captain Ruahei Demant pulled her team into a huddle, while the Springboks trotted past them and in to the changing rooms at Sandy Park.
The team talk, according to player-of-the-match Kaipo Olsen-Baker, was only three letters long: “AFD” which, Olsen-Baker just stopped herself from blurting out during a live TV interview afterwards, means “all fucking day”. They scored three tries in the next seven minutes play.
South Africa pushed New Zealand harder than anyone expected in the first quarter-final, especially in the first half. Which figures. It was their World Cup final, and they had been preparing for this game for a fortnight. Their coach, Swys de Bruin, rested eight of his starting team from their final pool game against France last week, and they had come equipped with a gameplan which had been designed entirely with New Zealand’s strengths and weaknesses in mind.
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There were lessons for the coaching teams of Canada and England. South Africa didn’t give the Black Ferns an inch in the first half, when they relied on their scrum, maul and a series of inventive training-ground plays at the lineouts, which they stretched to include all 15 players in one moment, and shrank to two players in the next.
They kept it high and tight as an army barber. Their back three refused to return any of New Zealand’s kicks, which meant they were starved of chances to cut loose in broken play. England, in particular, will have noticed that New Zealand struggled to defend South Africa’s maul.
If the first half was a lesson in how to beat the Black Ferns, the second was a lesson in how they beat you. They were fast, accurate and intense, and made South Africa pay for every mistake. This New Zealand team have more in them. And they will need it to beat Canada in the semi-finals. But it’s hard to avoid the impression that if the Springboks had been watching, and waiting, for this match against the Black Ferns, the Black Ferns have been watching and waiting for that match against England in a fortnight’s time – and it doesn’t much matter who they have got to get by to do it.
