Like poor Nolann Le Garrec, the France supporters sitting in front of their television screens on Saturday morning to savour the second test match of France’s summer tour of New Zealand (43-17) never saw it coming in the 14th minute. Everything had gone well for them up to that point, but Fabien Galthié’s men were sliced open without really understanding what had just happened to them.

It all started with a lineout on their own 22-metre line. Nothing alarming in itself, but the All Blacks added an ingredient of magic that made the sequence special and got plenty of tongues wagging afterwards. Once jumper Patrick Tuipulotu had taken the ball in the air, the men in black logically set themselves up for a maul, making as if to work back infield in order to send the play wide. Number 8 Christian Lio-Willie then came out of the pile, body turned towards his scrum-half, to fire the ball away. Except that he had nothing in his hands.

At that very moment, the ball, kept hidden by captain Ardie Savea, was sent to New Zealand scrum-half Cam Roigard, who was able to charge all the way to the French in-goal without meeting a single obstacle. Because Lio-Willie’s dummy and the ball coming away on the blindside happened simultaneously, France could not invoke law 16.11 of the laws of the game, which states that players must not “act in a way to make opponents believe that the maul has ended when it has not”. It was quite simply ingenious and beautifully executed.

Erasmus’s South Africa reinvent the lift in open play

More than 12,000 kilometres away, another southern-hemisphere giant showed it was not to be outdone for ingenuity. Right from the start of its match against Italy, South Africa set the tone with a strategic option that mixed confidence and cunning in equal measure. Springbok fly-half Manie Libbok deliberately struck an ultra-short kick-off of less than 10 metres, straight into the arms of a team-mate. The aim: to force the referee to stop play and offer the opposition two options, either to take the kick-off again or to be awarded a scrum in the middle of the pitch.

The Italians obviously went for the second option, in keeping with the spirit of the game, exactly as the South Africans had hoped, feeling far stronger in that particular exercise. The success was mixed, though, as Italy then won a penalty for a broken bind at the scrum. The referee could also have penalised the receiver for offside, or even handed the same sanction to Manie Libbok under law 9.7.a, which states that a player must “not intentionally infringe any law of the game”.

The Springboks generally felt far stronger up front, which led them to roll out an incredible tactic, this time far more in keeping with the laws. When they had the ball in Italian territory, the Springboks experimented with lifting a player in the middle of a three-man pod, as is done at the lineout but this time in open play, straight from a ruck. The manoeuvre was designed to set up a maul and let the superiority of the South African pack do the talking. With success, too, since two of the Springboks’ tries came that way.

A revolutionary strategy that the world champions’ rugby brain Rassie Erasmus insists he picked up after watching a youth match back home: “I’m not the one who invented it, I saw it done by an under-14 school team and it’s very interesting because you get in open play all the advantages of what you can do at the lineout. But it’s certain that from now on every team knows about it and will be watching out for it“. It is indeed quite possible that sides with a big pack will take their inspiration from the move and that we will see it again when the season resumes on pitches the length and breadth of France and elsewhere.