New Zealand have not toured South Africa properly since 1996. The tour that begins in Cape Town on 7 August is being sold as a return to something older, and in almost every practical respect it is the most modern piece of scheduling world rugby has produce.
Siya Kolisi has described this as the sort of tour his generation only heard about. He is right, and the reason his generation only heard about it is that the game spent 30 years deciding it could not afford one; now a rivalry that ran for 105 years without one now has a title sponsor.
Eight matches in six weeks, four against provincial sides and four Tests against the Springboks, is the shape of a rugby tour as it existed for most of the 20th century, and no national side has attempted it in this country for 30 years. It is also a fixture list that required the Rugby Championship to be stood down for a season, with the same concession already planned for 2030.
The competition returns in its usual form from 2027 to 2029, then disappears once more when the Springboks make the reciprocal journey and tour New Zealand for the first time in the professional era.
Why 1996 still matters
The last time New Zealand came, they arrived in a country two years past its first democratic election and a game three months into professionalism. John Hart’s side travelled with 36 players on what Sean Fitzpatrick still describes as the first properly professional tour, and won the series 2-1, the only series victory by any All Blacks team on South African soil.
Fitzpatrick remembers a series of very fine margins, finally settled in Pretoria, and recalls being met afterwards by Don Clarke, the great All Blacks full-back who had failed to win there in 1960, in tears.
That last comment speaks volumes, because New Zealand had toured South Africa in 1928, 1949, 1960, 1970 and 1976 and failed every time, and several of those tours are remembered in both countries for reasons that have very little to do with rugby, as is the Springbok visit to New Zealand that followed in 1981. Winning in 1996 closed an account that had been open for 68 years, and did so in the first winter in which either nation could pretend the fixture was only a fixture.
The side came home as the Incomparables, a name New Zealand Rugby has put back into circulation to promote this tour, and Fitzpatrick has spent the past few months arguing that a repeat would be ideal World Cup preparation, on the grounds that winning across four consecutive Saturdays with thirty or forty players is exactly the demand a World Cup makes.
The emotional case belongs to the supporters rather than the coaches. New Zealand Rugby expects around 3,000 travelling fans across the seven weeks, the majority of them Kiwis, which is a small number by Lions standards but an enormous one for a fixture that would ordinarily involve nobody crossing an ocean at all.
Kieran Read: Where the All Blacks must ‘match’ the Springboks’ ‘proven formula’
Four nights that belong to everyone
The part of this tour least discussed is the part that will feel most unfamiliar. Between 7 and 25 August the All Blacks play the Stormers in Cape Town, the Sharks at Kings Park in Durban, the Bulls at Loftus Versfeld and the Lions at Ellis Park, and for four evenings the fixture belongs to a province rather than to a country. That is a category of match, outside a Lions tour, that South African rugby has barely been able to stage in the professional era. Only the Lions have provided it, most recently behind closed doors in 2021.
The sides involved are not making up numbers either. The Stormers finished near the top of the United Rugby Championship regular season, and the Bulls reached the Grand Final, and Erasmus has released Evan Roos and Andre-Hugo Venter to the Stormers, Jaco Williams to the Sharks and Embrose Papier to the Bulls specifically so that they can play in these fixtures. Whatever the tour matches are for New Zealand, they are not exhibitions for the hosts. Durban and Pretoria each get one night against a black jersey and then wait for the cycle to come round again, by which time a good number of the players involved will be coaching.
That is the arithmetic that makes a quadrennial tour different from a Test window. A Rugby Championship match in Johannesburg is an event. A tour is a season, and it happens to a province rather than to a broadcaster. It is also, incidentally, the thing that used to prepare touring sides properly.
Cricket abandoned the equivalent fixture for the same commercial reasons rugby did, and now regularly watches visiting teams arrive three days out and lose the opening Test. New Zealand will have played three matches on South African soil before Ellis Park and that, workload and injuries aside, is serious rugby currency.
The machinery underneath the romance
For all the language about throwbacks, the tour is being run with a degree of control that no touring side of the amateur era would recognise. Dave Rennie has confirmed that the matchday 23s for the first four fixtures in South Africa, including the first Test at Ellis Park, were selected before the squad left New Zealand, and that the Test team was chosen before his side had played Ireland at Eden Park. The reason is travel. The party had been booked through Dubai; that routing became unworkable and was changed two or three months in advance, and the squad now arrives in three separate groups via Singapore, Hong Kong and Perth. Thirty players and staff went out first, with 33 players and seven staff staying behind for an additional training day before flying into Cape Town to prepare for the Stormers.
Ardie Savea is with none of them, the captain arriving 10 days before the first Test having been given a break on the basis that he has not stopped since January of last year. Eight fixtures inside six weeks will move the squad from sea level in Cape Town to the Highveld and back twice before a transatlantic flight to Baltimore, which is why Rennie has called it the toughest tour in rugby, and why he travels with 44 players where Hart managed on 36 for the same number of matches, having already lost Tamaiti Williams, Scott Barrett and Leicester Fainga’anuku to injury before departure.
Erasmus is managing the same problem from the other side of it, splitting his group between a party bound for Buenos Aires on 8 August and a recovering cohort left in Johannesburg with medical staff.
The tour that woos USA
Baltimore comes after all of it, the fourth Test at M&T Bank Stadium on 12 September being the first meeting between the two nations on American soil, a week after the third has been played in a Johannesburg stadium holding almost 95,000. Whatever the series has become by that point, the closing fixture of a tour that spent six weeks arguing about the Highveld will be settled at sea level, in front of a crowd many of whom will never have seen either side play.
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The commercial logic is not hidden, given that Baltimore is an applicant city for the 2031 World Cup, the first men’s tournament to be staged in the Americas, and a Test between the sides currently ranked first and second makes a useful audition for both a stadium and a market. The tour carries a title sponsor and a brand name of its own. It is also, unavoidably, the point at which the throwback stops being a throwback. Tours used to end where they ended because that was where the boat left from. This one ends in Maryland because that is where the modern calendar leads, and because somebody has to explain a breakdown to Baltimore.
None of which will matter a great deal to the players, who will be eight matches and the better part of seven weeks into something none of them has done before, or to the supporters in Cape Town and Durban and Pretoria who get to watch the All Blacks play their provincial side for the first time in three decades. The romance and the machinery arrived on the same aeroplane, or rather on three of them.