It’s hard to believe there’s ever been a team whose rugby DNA and personnel are so perfectly aligned with the laws as they stand and the way the game is being officiated.

Thankfully, the Greatest Rivalry series lived up to its billing.

Although the Springboks were clearly the better team, the All Blacks were highly competitive in every game. After the 10-43 humiliation in Wellington last year, it wasn’t being unduly alarmist to fear the Greatest Rivalry selling proposition would prove embarrassingly hyperbolic.

The good news is the All Blacks are a team on the rise. It’s a measure of the difficulty of their assignment that, in the history of the greatest rivalry, only two teams have won a series away from home: the 1937 Springboks and the 1996 All Blacks.

The bad news is there was precious little to suggest the Springboks are a team in decline. They continue to defy the sporting adage that getting to the top is the easy part; the hard part is staying there. Indeed, it’s hard to believe there’s ever been a team whose rugby DNA and personnel are so perfectly aligned with the laws as they stand and the way the game is being officiated.

Perhaps the All Blacks of the mid-60s, playing at home with Kiwi referees. Whereas the rest of the rugby world deplored the New Zealand way of rucking – i.e. trampling the shit out of any opponent who got between you and the ball – our refs took the view that, if you were silly enough to put yourself in that position, you had to cop it sweet. That All Blacks pack contained some of the toughest, meanest hombres on earth so what you copped was a world of pain.

The Springboks scrum for penalties not just because they can but because that approach is in sync with the northern hemisphere view that the scrum is a battle for the referee’s heart and mind, rather than a platform for ball in hand attack.

All Black-Springbok games are almost always refereed by Europeans on the lookout for infringements, however technical, and pre-disposed to reward the dominant scrum. Southern hemisphere referees are more laissez-faire, inclined to ignore instability providing the ball ends up in the halfback’s hands.

Perceived dominance wins penalties that deliver territory and possession. Plus, it has the benefit that your own errors are less costly because the game just reverts to your favoured area of contestation: the scrum. As the former England and British and Irish Lions prop Kyle Sinckler put it: “If your scrum’s on top, your backs can drop as many as they like.”

On the subject of refereeing appointments, it’s worth noting that, as things stand, Australian Angus Gardner is the only non-European referee likely to take charge of a New Zealand-South Africa test. (He had the second test in Cape Town and handled the scrums quite differently from the Englishmen and Georgian who had the others.)

Gardner’s compatriot Nic Berry should be an option but he hasn’t refereed the Springboks since July 2021 when they lost to the Lions in Cape Town. Once and future head coach Rassie Erasmus, for some reason masquerading as director of rugby, posted a 62-minute video excoriating Berry’s performance. World Rugby hit Erasmus with a couple of hefty bans but, seeing Berry hasn’t been appointed to a Springboks game since, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Erasmus lost the battle but won the war. And it’s easy to believe the international refereeing fraternity got World Rugby’s message, intentional or otherwise.

The maul, that unsightly anomaly that’s built on obstruction and makes the ball carrier a protected species, also rewards the attribute the Springboks have in abundance: sheer physical mass. And given that all aspects of their aerial game – kicking, kick chase, kick receipt, kick recovery – are excellent, they hardly needed any encouragement to pump it up. World Rugby gave it to them anyway with last year’s edict banning escort runners which leaves the kick receiver even more exposed to the oncoming horde.

South Africa also benefits from having a foot in both hemispheres: their top four franchises take part in a European club competition – thereby gaining exposure to northern officiating – while the Springboks take part in the southern hemisphere’s Rugby Championship.

But, while sleeping giant is the last thing you’d call the back-to-back world champions and clear number one team in the world, there’s reason to believe their extraordinary player depth is just the tip of the iceberg.

In the build-up to the final match, Sky showed a 2005 Tri-Nations test between the two sides. The Springboks’ starting XV contained two non-whites; in Baltimore there were six. In mid-2024 South Africa’s population was 63 million. “Whites” made up 7.2%; 81.7% were “Black Africans”, as is their beast of a loosehead prop, Ox Nche; 8.5% were “Coloureds”, as are their electric wings Kurt-Lee Arendse and Cheslin Kolbe.

There are a hell of a lot more where those guys came from.