John Smit's read on the scrum spat is sharp: Rennie's 'walking around' allegation was a deliberate deflection from the fact that New Zealand repeatedly dropped scrums under pressure in Cape Town — effectively conceding the battle while avoiding penalties. Smit's view is that Nche and Steenekamp have been so dominant for so long that Erasmus took the cheating allegation personally, hence the expletive-laden press conference response. But Smit thinks Rennie played it cleverly — by making the Boks the story, he buried the narrative that New Zealand had to resort to collapsing as their primary scrum survival tactic.
On the Soweto Test, Smit is unambiguous: this is the series decider, with Baltimore a commercial footnote. He flags that the Ellis Park performance was among the scrappiest he's seen from this Springbok side in years, but draws on the 2021 Lions series as evidence that this group responds to adversity by getting sharper. His gut call is a statement Springbok performance — provided they can neutralise the All Blacks' wide game and Roigard's distribution. If they do that, he believes the grinding, territory-based pressure that defines this Bok era will do the rest.