The Junior Springboks’ fell to a 34-26 loss to Italy on Thursday evening in what was a mud wrestle at Paarl Gymnasium in the Western Cape.

While South African supporters always expect a national men’s representative side to beat an Italian counterpart — South Africa’s shock 20-18 defeat to Italy in November 2016 was castigated as “rock bottom” for the senior men’s team, for example.

Context is important. The Junior Springboks played their first “international” match together in their 33-23 win over Georgia in their opening match of the under-20 Championship in Stellenbosch.

Instead, the team has had warm-up matches against club teams across the country including False Bay, Hamiltons and Maties.

This is opposed to Italy under-20 who have not only played together before the under-20 Championship, they have competed in an international tournament as a unit — the under-20 Six Nations, where they finished third, above England, Scotland and Wales.

“If you look at all the Six Nations teams they start playing the Six Nations comp from under-16 onwards and by the time they get to under-20 — in junior terms — they’ve got 50 international caps so it’s not something that we have, neither do we have the privilege of playing against them and testing ourselves,” Junior Springboks coach Bafana Nhleko acknowledged before the start of the under-20 Championship.

“We’ve got a great product which is our schoolboy [rugby] product and we must never go away from that because it’s a bedrock of our system [but] where we probably can get better as to understanding what that product needs to do to support the under-20 programme.”

Damian Markus of South Africa (right) during the World Rugby U20 Championship 2023, group C match against Italy at Paarl Gimnasium on 29 June, 2023. (Photo: Grant Pitcher/Gallo Images/World Rugby)

Covid intervention

While Nhleko has thrown his support behind the successful schoolboy rugby system in South Africa, the current crop of Junior Boks played no first-team rugby at school level.

Their grade 11 and 12 years coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic, when no contact sports were permitted in the country, in 2020 and 2021. Meaning the around 10,000 supporters at Danie Craven on Matchday one of the under-20 Championship was the biggest crowd they have ever played in front of.

“I think with the Covid generations, one thing that I find extremely challenging is their capacity to learn. Just because they didn’t have school,” Nhleko said about the training at the preparation camps prior to the under-20 Championships.

“It’s a capacity to constantly be challenged under pressure, because they didn’t play those rival games.

“So when you’re coming in as a coach and you say to them right, you’re going to spend X amount learning or we’re going to spend X amount of time on fundamentals, or we’re going to challenge you, they’re not used to that… That’s probably been the biggest difficulty.”

Nhleko, however, refused to make excuses for his side’s humbling defeat, instead giving all credit to Italy after the loss.

“We’ve been watching Italy play in the Six Nations. They really played good rugby. Not for once did we underestimate them. The reality is that we weren’t good enough,” the coach said.

“Just the way we started and then those double negatives with penalties, I think that just came back to haunt us.”

Damian Markus of South Africa celebrates scoring a try with team mates. It was a rare high point in the game (Photo: Grant Pitcher/Gallo Images/World Rugby)

Injury concerns

Last year, South Africa — also under the tutelage of Nhleko — participated in the Six Nations under-20 Summer Series where they dominated their northern hemisphere opposition to win the tournament.

That team consisted of United Rugby Championship players Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu and Suleiman Hartzenberg, among other sensational junior players.

With Mngomezulu a year older and Hartzenberg injured, Nhleko is unable to turn to the young starlets this time around.

While only a handful of players from that tournament are eligible to play this year — only five of which featured on Thursday. In the inexperienced forward pack, only hooker Juann Else and captain Paul de Villiers featured in the side last year.

Nhleko also decided prior to the tournament that every player in the 30-member under-20 Championship squad would play in the opening two matches of the tournament.

As a result, player of the match in the opening game against Georgia, flyhalf Jean Smith was left out of the match-day squad against Italy. Instead, Samuel Francis took up the general berth.

But an early ankle injury to the No 10 forced a rejig to the backline as the side were already 17 points down in the first half.

“I guess psychologically, it’s a question of how well the guys can react to [the injuries]. Italy imposed themselves early on, and they put us under pressure, regardless of the injuries. We just didn’t get going as well as we should have.”

Scrumhalf Neil le Roux also suffered a concussion and will be out for at least a week. The Junior Boks only have two scrumhalves in their squad and will likely have to call up another option before their next clash on Tuesday.

A fierce battle against Argentina is expected on 4 July at Athlone Stadium with both sides still in the hunt for a place in the semi-finals.

“The thing about Test rugby, because it is still Test rugby although it’s under-20 rugby. It doesn’t change,” Nhleko said.

“If your set-piece is functioning, if your kicking game is functioning, if your defence is functioning, then you put yourself in a position to build pressure and through that you can put points on the board but you need to be added for 80 minutes.

“For us [we were] probably good in moments, some really beautiful tries out there but you know from time to time really good defensively but then in other moments not so great and unfortunately the other guys we just were in it for longer, so they got the rewards, we weren’t good enough.” DM