Rugby's greatest rivalry? The history of All Blacks vs Springboks
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- New Zealand and South Africa first met on August 13, 1921 in Dunedin with the All Blacks winning 13-5, and across approximately 110 Test meetings the All Blacks hold a 63-43-4 record over the Springboks.
- During the apartheid era, South Africa requested Māori players be excluded from tours and New Zealand agreed, removing some of their finest players from several series during the 1960s and beyond.
- The 1981 tour drew fierce protest in New Zealand — 200 demonstrators at Hamilton tore down fencing and scattered nails on the pitch, while an aircraft dropped flour bombs on the final Test, briefly stunning All Blacks prop Gary Knight.
- The planned 1985 series was cancelled amid South Africa's wider sporting ban, with a New Zealand court ruling it 'incompatible with the NZRFU's legally stated purpose of fostering and encouragement of the game of rugby.'
- South Africa won the 1995 Rugby World Cup final 15-12 in extra time at Ellis Park after the All Blacks were hit by mass illness — coach Laurie Mains blamed a 'disappearing waitress named Suzie' and hired a private investigator.
- New Zealand's 'Incomparables' swept a three-Test series in South Africa in 1996, sparking a run in which the All Blacks won 13 of the next 17 Tests and went unbeaten against the Springboks from 2001 to July 2004.
- The 2026 tour features four Tests on August 22, August 29, September 5, and September 12, with the All Blacks having already beaten the Stormers, Sharks, and Bulls in warm-up matches.
Why it matters: The four-Test series replaces the absent 2026 Rugby Championship as the calendar's marquee fixture, giving Sky Sports and advertisers a tentpole product. For South Africa, the tour is an opportunity to entrench the momentum flip Erasmus engineered; for New Zealand, it tests how much ground they've ceded since the 2017 peak.
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