RASSIE'S PLAN: Boks will be 'much better team in 2027'

If there were any players or staff at the other World Cup nations who were hoping that the Springboks might feel they’ve had their fill and are satisfied with two successive global titles, they would have had a rude awakening listening to Rassie Erasmus speak.

Talking at the press conference where he announced his team for Saturday’s opening game of the new World Cup cycle against Wales in London, Erasmus left little doubt that he doesn’t see the Boks as the finished article.

We might have known it already with some of his appointments to his coaching staff since the Boks lifted the Holy Grail of rugby for the second successive time and record fourth in all in Paris last October, particularly that of the new attack/backline coach, the former Highlanders and Japan mentor Tony Brown.

It is hard to imagine Brown agreeing to be part of any system that does not put a high priority on ball in hand, attacking rugby, with the Boks already having started to become an ace counter-attacking team since the switch was flicked and they started to run the ball back at France in a test in Marseille in late 2022.

But maybe it needed confirmation, and that confirmation came through quite clearly in the audio from the press conference.

The reason Erasmus is back in the head coaching job, after dispensing with the extra responsibilities that come with the director of rugby role, is because he believes the Boks can build further on what won them the World Cups in Japan in 2019 and France in 2023.

In his words, when the Boks get to Australia in 2027, he thinks they will be a much improved team on what they are now.

STRENGTHENING THE FOUNDATION

And Saturday’s game at Twickenham is all about re-establishing the foundation that has already been built so that it can be built on and improved with the additions he intends making to the Bok game going forward.

“Things change so quickly. Look where we were in 2018 (when I took over). We won the World Cup just over a year later,” said Erasmus.

“Look at where Italy were a short while ago, and look where they are now. England were written off last year and then they went on a five game winning streak before they lost to us in the World Cup semifinal. Our first target on Saturday is to make sure our base is still there. We need to know that we can still do what we do well, what made us the World Cup champions. But then we want to build on that. By 2027 we want to be a much better team.”

Erasmus has something now that he, in his adjusted role as director of rugby, and the then head coach Jacques Nienaber did not have at the start of the last World Cup cycle.

He has four full years to prepare for the next World Cup in Australia.

Last time around it was only three. They didn’t know it when they celebrated their 2019 World Cup triumph in Yokohama, but it would be a year and a half, on the eve of a British and Irish Lions series, that the Boks would play together again.

That naturally inhibited the growth opportunity, and it meant the Boks had to stick largely with what they’d done to win in Japan in order to get home in the iconic but Covid blighted Lions series in 2021.

The Boks were criticised, particularly by overseas critics who described their approach as anti-rugby and too conservative, but in a country where winning is everything when it comes to rugby, Erasmus and Nienaber knew it would be folly to fly a changed game-plan when the team hadn’t played for 18 months.

OPPORTUNITY TO PUT ON THE EXTRA LAYERS THIS TIME

“The first thing we are trying to do now is to do what we didn’t do in 2020 because of Covid by putting extra layers on our game. We didn’t play at all in 2020 (SA was the only top rugby nation that sat out the whole year). Then obviously after that we went straight into a British and Irish Lions series.

“That left us in 2022, a year away from the World Cup, needing to throw in as many as sometimes 18 or 19 new players into our match day squads for games against Wales in Bloemfontein and some away games in Argentina. It wasn’t ideal but it was necessary. Sometimes we lost those matches, which was not ideal.”

Indeed, Erasmus faced a similar problem in his first season as Bok coach in 2018.

His appointment came just 18 months out from the World Cup in Japan, and it meant he needed to experiment liberally on occasions in his search for the right combinations.

It was every bit the “ambulance job” that South Africa’s first World Cup-winning coach, the late Kitch Christie, embarked on when he got the job less than a year out from the 1995 event hosted by this country.

BOKS HAVE A WINNING TEAM AND CULTURE TO BUILD ONTO

So for the first time, he can look forward and look to build systematically.

Most importantly, the core of a winning team is still around to help him bleed in the abundance of promising young talent and future stars that the South African game is unearthing through the participation in the Vodacom United Rugby Championship.

“What are trying to do right now is make sure we are where we were when we won the World Cup, that we still have our core things and still have a good base in terms of how we play the game,” said Erasmus.

“We also want to start introducing what the new coaches are bringing and we want to start putting that onto what we already have. It is important though that we have a sound base and then we need to build from there.

“I will always have a long term hat on while also trying to win the current games. For this week, the Bulls were not available. The Stormers were only able to train with us from late last week. Those Stormers players we have selected, like Evan Roos, are guys who have played for us before, so that was easy. He knows the systems.

“Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu was also part of an SA A tour before he got injured. He spent a lot of time on that trip training with the Springboks. Jordan (Hendrikse) has been on our radar and he has trained with us for two weeks, and the same with Edwill (Van der Merwe, also from the Lions).

“BJ (Ben-Jason Dixon of the Stormers) is a guy we have been looking at and has impressed us in alignment camps. He was with us for two or three weeks in Cape Town. We are looking for a guy like Pieter-Steph (Du Toit), someone who is good in the lineouts and can also give us momentum there and is also good at stopping opposition momentum.

“We are putting these guys into the mix with experienced guys around them. In doing that we are not doing what maybe we were forced to do in the past by going in with seven or eight new guys. That would be throwing them to the wolves. The new guys don’t have to worry about leading etc, they just need to go out and play their game, deliver what got them selected.”