Dave Rennie's biggest selection puzzle of the season is not the July Test starting XV. It is the side he picks for August 7 in Cape Town, the All Blacks' first match of their three-game South African tour, against a Stormers team that will have been preparing for them for weeks.
The Devlin Sports Podcast Network's Martin Devlin walked through the maths with longtime rugby journalist Nigel Yalden and Jamie Wall. The July Tests, against Ireland and through the wider Nations Championship window, finish on July 18. Thirty-four players will be selected to play those three Tests, and Devlin believes Rennie will give all 34 a run. Forty-four travel to South Africa.
"Do the math," Devlin said. "That means 10 players on tour won't have played since the end of their Super Rugby seasons. There is five weeks between that last Test against Ireland and the first Test against South Africa. We play on the Friday night, we play the Tuesday, and then we play the Sharks on the Saturday. So there are effectively three trials."
Which made the panel's job a curious one. "It feels like we're picking somewhere between the All Blacks and the All Blacks XV," Wall said. "Depending on what happens between now and then, it's kind of like All Blacks — or sort of 75 percent."
Yalden was given the chief-selector chair and went straight to the front row. He paired Ethan de Groot, Asafo Aumua and Tyrel Lomax — a Hurricanes-heavy unit designed to send a scrum message into the tour from minute one.
"This is a tour of South Africa," Yalden said. "At the moment South Africa take massive pride with regards to the scrum. The scrum is going to be a massive component of the test matches as well. So you need to start out on the right foot. You need two high-quality scrummagers. I love what Ofa Tu'ungafasi is doing at the moment, but I just want to make sure that Lomax is right at the level that they are going to need him to be. He has had time away. He has had issues with the ankle. We just need to make sure that he's fully versed."
The Aumua selection was Yalden's spiciest pick. With Codie Taylor, Sam Whitelock-adjacent veterans, George Bell and Aumua all in the four-deep hooker conversation, Yalden went for the explosive option and credited the player's reset under previous head coach Scott Robertson.
"It does come back to what the previous All Black coach Scott Robertson said to Asafo Aumua," Yalden said. "Go away, get yourself right, come back and be the beast that we know you can be. I love what I saw from him on Saturday night in that game against the Blues. That little six-minute scrap involving Shields and Sotutu seemed to fizz him up."
The lock conversation is where Rennie's biggest unknown sits. Yalden tipped Tupou Vaa'i and Josh Lord, with Fabian Holland — who has been ramping up his return from injury and is now "not too far away," according to recent comments from Highlanders coach Jamie Joseph — likely to come into the mix on tour. Captaincy may turn on Scott Barrett's fitness, which has not yet been confirmed. "This is also probably going to come down to the captaincy debate as well," Wall said. "This is going to give us an idea of where he actually is on Dave Rennie's depth chart."
Devlin made the broader point that frames the entire exercise. The Stormers will have had the tour fixture in their calendar for months. They will treat the All Blacks' first hit-out of the August window as the biggest club fixture of their year. For Rennie, the temptation is to use the match as a continuity vehicle — get the locked-in starters into combinations early — but he also has 10 players who will not have played a competitive match in five weeks.
The DSPN consensus was that Rennie will lean toward continuity in the spine of the team and use the bench to bleed the rust off the players who came off the production line of the July Tests. The first selection meeting that matters, the panel agreed, is the one Rennie will hold in the week after Ireland.
