Venter: South Africa ‘unbelievably blessed’ in World Cup triumph

Brendan Venter feels South Africa benefitted from huge amounts of good fortune on their way to winning a fourth World Cup title, which he believes any of the pre-tournament favourites would have needed to be able to win the competition.

Venter, a 1995 World Cup winner with South Africa and former Springboks defence coach, cites factors that took his country over the line in all three of the knockout games they came through, each of them won by a single point against France, England and New Zealand.

When asked whether South Africa’s consecutive one point triumphs proved they were simply the best team under pressure on The Rugby Paper Podcast, Venter disagreed by pointing our how different the circumstances were for each victory.

“When we saw the way this World Cup was set up, and some of my friends asked me what I thought, I just said to them: ‘Basically, the team that’s going to win will need a load of luck,’” he recalled.

“The idea that luck always pans out, like six of one half a dozen of the other, in this case doesn’t apply, because the reasons why things went South Africa’s way were very different in each game.

“You take the England game Ox [Nche], Vinny [Koch] and Bongi [Mbonambi] scrummed brilliantly, but the opposition that came on were not nearly as strong, and that same impact was nullified by the All Blacks despite the 7-1 split. The thing that did it in the final was the yellow and red cards, so that was just something completely different.

“Against France, France were cruising. The thing that did it there was that while France should have been gone, they kept breaking the line but couldn’t finish. At 25-19 I said to my wife: ‘We’re going to win this, they’re not putting us away,’ not because I’m clever, purely from loads of watching rugby.

“The game turned, we got a bit of energy, got a penalty here and there, and suddenly we score and win the game. So I think [the luck] was very diverse. This was our tournament, it’s as simple as that.

“How can one team have so many good things go their way? It’s literally impossible. It’s just amazing, for many times as a South African we’ve been at the taking side of this thing, we’ve had calls go against us, but in this case so many calls went our way we can actually just be thankful about it.”

Although Venter partly agrees with the assertion that South Africa had made much of their own luck too, focusing on the try that had put them ahead against France in the quarter-final as evidence of this, he also stands by the fact that happenstance had a major part to play.

He feels that in key situations, moments that South Africa had very little to do with manufacturing gave them huge amounts of energy to draw from, which gave them impetus to get over the line.

“When South Africa kick a cross kick against France,” he added. “They kick to the smallest wing on the field, and they put Eben Etzebeth and Pieter-Steph [Du Toit] there who get the crumbs, then the ball rebounds and they score a try, that for me is making your own luck. You’ve created a play, you’re not going to score necessarily but you’ve put things in your favour about 70 per cent.

“As a coach you always look at something and say: ‘What did I contribute to, and what did I have absolutely zilch, zero, nothing to do with?’

“Those are actually the things I’m discussing here when I feel we were unbelievably blessed. We had nothing to do with Frizell’s yellow card, we had nothing to do with Cane’s red card, there were so many little things that just kept swinging in our favour.

“You look at the England game, I think in the 59^th minute they’ve got a five-metre scrum. They’re 15-6 up, the first scrum gets reset. If Ben Earl picks that ball up and carries, and they come round the corner, the chance of a penalty is really good, they go 18-6 up and we are out on our feet.

“What happened? We got energy from Ox and Vinny’s [next] scrum [which won a penalty]. Energy is this weird thing, we don’t know how it happens, but belief comes in. If that didn’t happen, and the pen went the other way, we wouldn’t have got it.

“We got the energy at the right times from these games, and it didn’t always come from something we planned.”

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Written by Nick Powell

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