Why talk of the death of the All Blacks is exaggerated & premature

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Published on 17th September 2025 | Leave a response

The All Blacks took a beating against the Springboks in Wellington, but history a reminder that the occasional rugby beating does not make for the death of a famed rugby nation. If it was so, the Springboks would be ashes in an urn, writes Mark Keohane.

What has stunned the rugby world about the Springboks 43-10 win in Wellington, New Zealand last Saturday is that historically the All Blacks may lose, but they seldom get beaten up.

Be guaranteed they will be back, just as the Springboks always have bounced back from their darkest days to win four Rugby World Cup titles and some of the biggest Test matches, in which they were written off because of a historical result or results.

The Boks have inflicted the two biggest points differential defeats in All Blacks history, 33 points in Wellington last Saturday and 28 points at Twickenham in 2023, pre the World Cup.

The All Blacks, in 658 Tests, have lost by 20 or more points four times.

No team has scored 50-plus points in a Test against the All Blacks. The Springboks have scored 46 and 43, Australia has scored 47 and France on one occasion went past 40 against them. This is in 658 Tests.

The All Blacks have won three World Cup titles and 20 Tri-nations/Rugby Championship titles. The Boks are second best with five titles and one better in World Cup titles with four.

Many of the back to back Springboks World Cup winning squads of 2019 and 2023 were in the teams beaten 57-15 in Durban in 2016 and 57-0 in Albany in 2017.

My point is that the All Blacks will only improve over the next two seasons in the lead into the World Cup played in Australia. To dismiss them as yesterday’s news is to make the same mistake so many did about the Springboks when the All Blacks were pumping the South Africans, Ireland was winning 38-3, England was pounding the Boks, Argentina was rolling them in South Africa and in Argentina, Scotland were doing a number on them, Wales were on a roll against them and even Italy got in a historic home win.

The Boks have been through darker times than the All Blacks have experienced, yet the Boks recovered and in the past six years have been the dominant Test team in the game.

But those very same players who took 57 points in Albany, the likes of Siya Kolisi, Eben Etzebeth, Tendai Mtawarira, Malcolm Marx, Franco Mostert, Lood de Jager, Pieter-Steph du Toit, Handre Pollard and Damian de Allende, went onto win World Cup titles, with seven of the nine winning back to back World Cup titles.

The All Blacks will have flyhalf Richie Mo’unga back for the 2027 World Cup. Mark Telea may be back from Japan and on the wing. There are three or four other prominent All Blacks based overseas who are so good that it may just force a rethink in the All Blacks policy of not picking eligible players based outside of New Zealand.

New Zealand will be the late arrivals to the party that promotes the virtues of picking the best players in the world to play Test rugby, regardless of where they play their club rugby.

As a Boks supporter it is natural to revel in the brilliance of the Boks and the cycle from 2019 to 2025, which has seen the Boks win back to back World Cup titles, a British & Irish Lions series, a Rugby Championship and seven wins in the last 10 against the All Blacks, which is significantly better than the historical win percentage of less than 40 percent. These wins have pushed the Boks win percentage up to 42 percent against a rugby nation, whose 58 percent win rate against the Boks is the lowest of all their win rates against any other nation.

Australia, with a 30 percent win rate against the All Blacks, is the next best and the All Blacks since their first Test have won 77 percent of their 658 Tests against all 19 nations, 12 of which have never beaten the All Blacks.

A lost aura is not be confused with the death of a rugby nation.

When we say the aura is gone, it is because the seeming impossible of going to New Zealand and beating the All Blacks is now very possible in this modern age when so little separating the top eight teams in the professional game.

What the All Blacks have achieved over time is remarkable but right now they are the victims of their own success, and they are in crisis because of the magnitude of their historical success.

The celebrated 2011 and 2015 All Blacks World Cup winner Sonny Bill Williams, post the All Blacks defeat to Argentina in Buenos Aires, said there should be an acknowledgement that other teams have also improved and it is not as simple as the All Blacks having gotten worse.

Sir John Kirwan, the famed 1987 World Cup winner and try-scoring machine on the right wing, said the 43-10 record defeat to the Boks was the crisis that was needed because it would force debate, discussion and transparency of the All Blacks of 2025.

He was another, like Zels and myself, to say the Boks, like Argentina and Ireland in the past few years, have buried the aura of the All Blacks being untouchable in New Zealand.

But to think the All Blacks won’t be back is to not learn from the history and, in particular, the history of the Springboks.

Here are 15 times since the Boks’ international reintroduction that the All Blacks have beaten the Boks, in New Zealand, in South Africa and on neutral ground, with the lowest being a 15 points differential and the biggest being 57 points.

In those 15 Tests the All Blacks blanked the Boks twice, in New Zealand and in South Africa, and went past 50 on four occasions, twice in New Zealand and twice in South Africa.

The Boks have hit rock bottom against the All Blacks and responded with four World Cup titles, with two of the four wins in the final agains the All Blacks, in 1995 and in 2023.

For now the roles have been reversed, which does not make it a permanent situation.

Here is the rugby history lesson to remind us South Africans to enjoy the moment, but to know the men in black will be back, as was the case with our Rainbow Warriors.

1997: All Blacks 55 Boks 35 (Eden Park, Auckland)

1999: All Blacks 28 Boks 0 (Dunedin)

2002: All Blacks 41 Boks 20 (Wellington)

2003: All Blacks 52 Boks 16 (Loftus, Pretoria)

2003: All Blacks 29 Boks 9 (Melbourne)

2006: All Blacks 35 Boks 17 (Wellington)

2006: All Blacks 45 Boks 26 (Loftus, Pretoria)

2007: All Blacks 33 Boks 6 (Christchurch)

2008: All Blacks 19 Boks 0 (Newlands, Cape Town)

2010: All Blacks 32 Boks 12 (Eden Park, Auckland)

2011: All Blacks 40 Boks 7 (Wellington)

2016: All Blacks 41 Boks 13 (Christchurch)