Pablo Matera captains a much-changed Argentina at Vélez, with four uncapped players in the 23 and a fly-half missing through suspension. Siya Kolisi returns for his first Test of the year.
The top line
Pablo Matera leads Argentina at Vélez on Saturday with Julián Montoya back with his club and Tomás Albornoz serving a four-match ban for confronting Angus Gardner after the England Test, and that sentence tells you most of what you need to know about where Los Pumas find themselves in August 2026 as they have appeared to take a step back from their 2025 form.
Thirteen changes to the starting side, four uncapped players in the match 23, and no first-choice ten, because he went after a referee. Yes, Argentina have been disappointing this year, and the disappointment has not been confined to the scoreboard; they lost 47-38 to Scotland in Córdoba, recovered to beat Wales 35-21, then lost 31-24 to England in Santiago del Estero and spent the aftermath surrounding the officials, with Contepomi widely criticised for his own conduct and Ben Youngs saying he hoped World Rugby would hand out bans. World Rugby did precisely that.
Refereeing standards have rarely been higher than they are now, and whatever you made of the decisions in Santiago del Estero, the reaction to them was indefensible, and it has cost Argentina their first-choice fly-half for the biggest home fixture of their season. Time to rein in the histrionics and play some rugby.
The Springboks will do their shouting at the scoreboard. Rassie Erasmus has made 13 changes of his own, although his are the changes of a coach with too many good players rather than too few, and they bring back Siya Kolisi as captain for the first time this year alongside Eben Etzebeth, Lood de Jager, Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu and Morné van den Berg, all of whom missed the Nations Championship injured. Only Aphelele Fassi and Cobus Reinach survive from the side that beat Wales 43-0 in Durban.
There is no Rugby Championship in 2026, so this is the only meeting between the two all year, and the Copa Visa Galicia goes to the winning captain on the 40th anniversary of Argentina first playing at Vélez. It is the fifth Test between these sides at the ground, and South Africa have won the previous four.
Where the game will be won
Argentina have to own the second after the tackle
Felipe Contepomi’s plan will be the one it always is against South Africa, which is to get numbers to the collision, make every tackle a contest and slow Springbok ruck ball to a speed at which Feinberg-Mngomezulu cannot play, and Matera and Benjamín Grondona are picked to do precisely that.
South Africa are a different attacking team from the one that won the World Cup, because Tony Brown has them playing at tempo, and the 45 points they put on England and the 42 they put on Scotland came from quick ball rather than from mauling anybody into the ground. Take the speed away and you take away most of what they have added since 2023.
The trouble for Argentina is the personnel available to take it away, because André Esterhuizen at 12, Cameron Hanekom at eight and Elrigh Louw at seven represent an enormous amount of weight running at a midfield of Lucio Cinti and Faustino Sánchez Valarolo, who has two caps, with Ignacio Mendy on five behind them, Gerónimo Prisciantelli on four and Benjamín Grondona on two in the back row.
South Africa’s matchday 23 holds a reported 717 caps. Argentina’s holds four men who have never won one. None of that will show early, because Vélez will be full and loud, the crowd has waited all year for this, and Argentina will fly into contact for half an hour or more. It shows around the hour, when Handré Pollard, Marco van Staden and Jan-Hendrik Wessels come on and Argentina are still asking two-cap forwards to hold a line.
Francisco Moreno’s first cap against the best scrum in the world
Francisco
Moreno becomes Puma 909 on Saturday, and he does it packing down opposite Boan Venter with Lood de Jager shoving behind him, which is about as unforgiving a way to start a Test career as the fixture list allows, and Contepomi has not pretended otherwise. It’s the rugby equivalent of making your first stage appearance against a firing squad.
It matters because the last meeting was decided in exactly that department. South Africa won 29-27 at Twickenham last October and the scrum was the reason; Argentina had the better of large parts of the afternoon and still lost the game at the set-piece, and if that happens again the margin will be considerably worse than it was in London.
Argentina do have something in the lineout, because Tomás Lavanini returns at 33 for his 92nd cap after two years out of the side and packs down with Guido Petti, the most-used second-row pairing in the country’s history and the one that started the famous win in Durban in 2015. They have 192 Tests of reading opposition ball between them; Johan Grobbelaar, throwing for South Africa, has nine caps in total.
That is Argentina’s one clear edge in the tight, and Rodrigo Isgró more or less said as much this week when he pointed out that “teamwork and set plays are going to be very important”. He has played against this pack before and he knows where the game goes.
What they said
Erasmus has spent the week talking Argentina up, describing a side with “a strong pack and dangerous backs” and pointing to the crowd as a factor in its own right, whilst being entirely open about what the fixture is for, which is getting Kolisi, Etzebeth, de Jager and Feinberg-Mngomezulu eighty hard minutes into their legs before Ellis Park on 22 August.
Contepomi framed the window around workload when he named the squad, saying “physical and mental health is crucial for us” and explaining that resting the France-based players was what allowed him to look at ten uncapped men, which is a coach telling you in advance how he would like the next month to be judged.
Kolisi kept it simple, saying it had been tough watching from the sideline and that there are a few of them getting their chance now.
Players to watch
Moreno comes first, for the reasons above, and if he holds his scrum for 50 minutes against Venter and then Gerhard Steenekamp, Argentina will have found the tighthead they badly need before 2027.
Lavanini is the selection that tells you what Contepomi expects from the afternoon, because a 33-year-old two years out of the side is not recalled for a Test you intend to play at width, and he has never needed asking twice. Whether he sees out 80 minutes without a card is a separate question, and one the bookmakers have already noticed.
Cameron Hanekom has two caps and the number eight shirt in a game South Africa expect to be physical, and as the most natural ball-carrying eight in their system this is his audition for the All Blacks series that starts a fortnight later.
Feinberg-Mngomezulu is the most watchable player on the field the moment a game breaks up, and with Prisciantelli and Mendy holding nine caps between them in the back three, expect a great deal of contestable kicking aimed squarely at the pair of them.
Watch Benjamín Grondona at seven as well, a two-cap flanker asked to slow Springbok ball alongside his captain, and the younger brother of Santiago, who started the last meeting between these sides. The family keeps turning up in this fixture.
The main head-to-head
Pieter-Steph du Toit is not in this squad, which puts the game’s real duel where it belongs, between the two men wearing six and carrying the armband.
Matera has 124 caps, more than any Argentine in history, and Kolisi wins his 104th, and the two of them are close to the same player in different colours: heartbeats of their teams, whose best work comes in the second after contact rather than with ball in hand, and who are in these sides because their teams need a voice at least as much as they need a body.
Condition separates them, because Kolisi’s only rugby this year was the uncapped match against the Barbarians in June whilst Matera has been playing without a break, and for the first hour that ought to favour Argentina at the breakdown. Erasmus knows it, which is why Van Staden is on the bench.
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Matera also has much the harder job, since Kolisi is steering a side with only two survivors from the last Test team but the better part of 717 caps around him, whereas Matera is captaining four debutants and a back division holding 149 caps between seven men, in front of a crowd that will lose its mind at the first turnover. Get that group through the third quarter and Argentina have a Test match; lose them and it goes quickly.
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South Africa have won 35 of the 40 meetings and have never lost at Vélez, where the record reads played four, lost four, and they arrive unbeaten in 2026 having put 80 points on the Barbarians and won their three Nations Championship matches by an aggregate of 130-49.
This will be closer than some are calling it. There are people predicting a 35-point hammering, and that is reading the team sheet without reading the fixture, because Argentina at home, with Matera in charge and a debutant pack playing for their careers, will be level or thereabouts at the half hour and will score tries.
But four uncapped players, a midfield holding 44 caps and a bench that finishes with Pollard is too much to give South Africa across 80 minutes, and the Boks pull away in the final quarter with their famed Bomb Squad as they have all year. South Africa by 25: 46-21.
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The Teams
Argentina: 15 Gerónimo Prisciantelli, 14 Rodrigo Isgró, 13 Lucio Cinti, 12 Faustino Sánchez Valarolo, 11 Ignacio Mendy, 10 Santiago Carreras, 9 Simón Benítez Cruz, 8 Joaquín Moro, 7 Benjamín Grondona, 6 Pablo Matera (c), 5 Tomás Lavanini, 4 Guido Petti, 3 Francisco Moreno, 2 Ignacio Ruiz, 1 Boris Wenger
Replacements: 16 Leonel Oviedo, 17 Mayco Vivas, 18 Tomás Rapetti, 19 Efraín Elías, 20 Juan Penoucos, 21 Juan Martín Scelzo, 22 Agustín Moyano, 23 Matías Moroni
Springboks: 15 Aphelele Fassi, 14 Edwill van der Merwe, 13 Canan Moodie, 12 Andre Esterhuizen, 11 Ethan Hooker, 10 Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, 9 Cobus Reinach, 8 Cameron Hanekom, 7 Elrigh Louw, 6 Siya Kolisi (c), 5 Lood de Jager, 4 Eben Etzebeth, 3 Thomas du Toit, 2 Johan Grobbelaar, 1 Boan Venter
Replacements: 16 Jan-Hendrik Wessels, 17 Gerhard Steenekamp, 18 Zachary Porthen, 19 Ben-Jason Dixon, 20 Cobus Wiese, 21 Marco van Staden, 22 Morne van den Berg, 23 Handre Pollard
Venue: Estadio José Amalfitani, Buenos Aires
Kick-off: 16:00 (local ART), 20:00 (UK), 21:00 (France), 21:00 (South Africa), 05:00 (9 August, AEST), 07:00 (9 August, New Zealand), 16:00 (Argentina), 04:00 (9 August, JST), 15:00 (EDT)
Referee: Pierre Brousset (FFR)
Assistant Referees: Luc Ramos (FFR), Craig Evans (WAL)
TMO: Ben Whitehouse (WRU)
FPRO: Ian Tempest (RFU)
How to watch: Sky Sports+ (UK & Ireland), ESPN and Disney+ Premium (Argentina), SuperSport (South Africa), Movistar Plus+ (Spain), Sky Sport Now (New Zealand), WOWOW (Japan), RugbyPass TV / FloRugby / Stan Sport (USA, Australia, Canada)
