After a low-key World Championship campaign, the Junior Springboks caught the nation’s attention by knocking out their All Black counterparts out.
Wednesday’s night 25-17 victory had everything you wanted to see from a South African rugby side.
There was physical domination as expected.
But what really caught the eye was the invention and skill from our youngsters - something that is regularly missing from the senior side.
Why this is the case is a question that never seems to be answered. We generally say that all the best attacking instincts are coached out of the players once they reach the professional ranks.
The need to fit into “the system” often wipes out the x-factor of these players and it hardly ever comes back once the players “mature”.
One has to wonder how a player’s natural ability can’t be utilised as an asset for the team.
At Super Rugby level, you see creative players distrusted by coaches or given too little time to “break” games from the bench.
Just look at former Baby Bok star Curwin Bosch at the Sharks this season and even Damian Willemse to an extent at the Stormers.
What worries me the most about this inability to identify and nurture the talents we have, is SA Rugby’s new contracting model.
Big-name stars are now set to earn the lion’s share of the money and young players getting much smaller contracts, so how do we hope to keep how brightest emerging talents happy and in SA?
With the Baby Boks showing the way of how to get the better of the All Blacks, those kids could be picked off more easily thanks to rugby bosses being just too eager to process these boys through the “system”.