The All Blacks will begin their first full tour of South Africa in three decades without the man who leads them. Coach Dave Rennie named a 44 player squad on Monday for the inaugural Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry tour and confirmed captain Ardie Savea will be rested for the opening weeks, with veteran hooker Codie Taylor taking the armband as tour captain until he arrives.
Savea has barely stopped since the start of last year, moving between Moana Pasifika, Japanese club rugby with Kobe and the black jersey, and leading the side through the Nations Championship Southern Series this month. Rennie said the decision to hold him back was straightforward once the schedule was laid out.
“Ardie’s been training and playing since January 2025,” Rennie told RNZ. “This seemed the obvious time.” He added that “freshening him up prior to those four tests is essential” and that “it’s a decision that we’ve made on what we think is best for him”.
Savea will join the squad in the days before the first test against the Springboks at Ellis Park on 22 August, missing the early provincial matches. In his absence the tour will be run by Taylor, one of the most capped forwards in the country and a player Rennie has leaned on for years without ever handing him the job outright.
Rennie said Taylor had “a huge amount of respect within this group” and that the squad had “a variety of leaders who we think can do the job on the day”. “It’s a good chance to grow others, but I’ve got a really high opinion of Codie,” he said.
There is a wrinkle in that appointment. Taylor is carrying an injury picked up during the Nations Championship match against Ireland and is not expected to feature in the early franchise games, which means the tour captain may spend the first fortnight in a tracksuit. Rennie was relaxed about it, pointing out Taylor had only been pencilled in for one of the three warm up fixtures anyway, and that the squad has enough senior figures to fill match day captaincy on a rotating basis.
Rennie and fellow selectors Sir Graham Henry and Neil Barnes retained all 34 players from the Southern Series squad and added ten more for what will be a seven week trip. Three of those are uncapped. Hurricanes prop Siale Lauaki, 23, was part of the front row that won this year’s Super Rugby title and can pack down on either side of the scrum. Moana Pasifika loose forward Semisi Tupou Ta’eiloa, 22, led Super Rugby Pacific for carries last season on the way to being named his club’s rookie of the year and best defensive player. Chiefs first five Josh Jacomb, 25, was the second highest points scorer in last year’s NPC and won the Duane Monkley Medal as the competition’s player of the year.
Ta’eiloa’s reaction to the call, as reported by RNZ, will be familiar to anyone who has ever waited by a phone. “When I got that phone call I couldn’t really stand up, legs were shaking,” he said. Rennie described the conversations plainly. “They’re life changing phone calls for those men.”
Seven capped players come back into the group in Ollie Norris, George Bell, Fabian Holland, Ethan Blackadder, Timoci Tavatavanawai, Rieko Ioane and Emoni Narawa. Prop Tamaiti Williams, lock Scott Barrett and midfielder Leicester Fainga’anuku are all unavailable through injury, with Barrett’s continued absence the reason Savea has the captaincy in the first place.
The tour itself is the part that has rugby people talking. It is eight matches, four of them tests, and it is the first time since 1996 that a New Zealand side has gone to South Africa for a proper tour rather than a fly in fly out fixture. That 1996 side won the series two one, the first New Zealand team ever to take a series on South African soil.
The itinerary starts against the Stormers at DHL Stadium in Cape Town on 7 August, then the Sharks at Kings Park in Durban on 11 August and the Bulls at Loftus Versfeld in Pretoria on 15 August. The first test follows at Ellis Park on 22 August, with a fixture against the Lions at the same ground three days later. The second test is in Cape Town on 29 August and the third at FNB Stadium in Johannesburg on 5 September. The series then leaves the continent entirely, finishing at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore on 12 September, the home of the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens and a venue that seats around 71,000. It is the first time the fixture has been staged in the United States, as the NZ Herald reported when the venue was confirmed.
Rennie is not pretending it will be comfortable. “With eight matches in six weeks, including a four-Test series against the Springboks, this would have to be the toughest tour in rugby,” he said in the squad announcement. “This tour will challenge us and demand the very best of us … It will be an intense seven weeks of touring but an excellent opportunity for us to pit ourselves against the current benchmark team in world rugby, and to build connections with each other in a way that only a tour of this scale can do.”
New Zealand Rugby chief executive Steve Lancaster said the tour has drawn a response from supporters that goes well beyond the usual away following. “This is the next chapter in one of our sport’s defining rivalries,” he said. “Fans from both nations and around the world have embraced the concept with around 3,000 fans expected to travel for the tour.”
The traditional four team Rugby Championship, with Australia and Argentina, returns in 2027. For this year the calendar has been cleared for a single long stretch of All Blacks against Springboks, which is either a gift or a gauntlet depending on how the first fortnight goes. Rennie has three weeks of provincial rugby to sort out combinations, blood three new players and get a rested captain back into the side before any of it counts.
Is resting Savea for the provincial games the right call, or should the captain be there from the first whistle to set the tone for a tour this size? Leave a comment below and tell us how you see the series playing out.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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