Coach’s melodrama can help propel Boks to the top
Only Rassie Erasmus knows whether he really feared Italy as much as he said he did before the decisive World Cup pool B clash and how much of the hype was just him being a drama queen for the effect it might have on his Springbok team.
We ve seen him play the drama’queen game before. In 2018, before the Rugby Championship clash with the All Blacks in Wellington, he spoke of his job being on the line if the team lost. Erasmus would have known that was nonsense.
He’s been signed on as national director of rugby until 2023, and it would have taken a lot for his employers to turn against him in the first season he was in charge.
But he welcomed the pressure and wanted the Boks to go into the Wellington game feeling like it was all-or-nothing. And in a sense that pressure was real as Erasmus did ratchet up extra pressure on himself by making sacrifices towards the goal of winning it by weakening his team for the previous game against Australia.
He knew the most important part of his challenge as Bok coach would be to get his team to believe they could beat the All Blacks again. The win was an important moment in the Springbok growth under Erasmus, and it fitted nicely into a grand plan to get his players used to the intense pressure that comes with playing World Cup play-off games.
That pressure, and the effect of that pressure is something he knows only too well after being part of the Bok group, in his role as technical director to Peter de Villiers, that was blown out by the Bryce Lawrence refereeing freak show in 2011.
Pieter-Steph du Toit said it after the win over Italy: “We’ve been in a lot of must-win games over the past two years.”
The Italy game was a mustwin in the sense that had the Boks lost they would have been out of the World Cup before the end of the pool phases for the first time in their history.
But did Erasmus really think his team might lose? I doubt it.
While he built Italy up as potential world beaters before the game, afterwards he was seeing them for what they are: a team that consistently foots the Six Nations log and has not beaten a tier-one team for a long time.
Not that the win wasn’ ta significant one. The powerful and physical forward performance was spine-chilling to future opponents, with Italy coach Conor O’Shea describing the Boks as one of the most powerful teams he had seen on a rugby field. He said they’d be hard to stop.
Interestingly, it was an Irish journalist who asked the question of O’Shea that elicited that comment. The intense Ireland focus on the Boks may have changed a bit subsequent to Ireland losing to Japan, but regardless of whether the Boks play Ireland or hosts nation Japan in their quarterfinal, the Italy game was a good dry run for the focus on winning the big moments and retaining both physicality and accuracy across an entire 80 minutes that a play-off demands.
They didn’t get the latter part 100% right in Shizuoka, but they did the first. They’re building nicely and provided the forward unit is kept together, they have a great chance of winning SA’s third World Cup title.
That qualification refers as much to the status of Eben Etzebeth, who is the subject of a storm back home as it does to the possibility there could be injuries that derail Erasmus’s plans.
I’m reluctant to write about the Etzebeth situation, as like everyone else not directly involved in it I have no clue what happened that night in Langebaan that made Etzebeth the elephant in the room.
But you are innocent until proven guilty, and there is no video evidence of the incident as clear as that which got England cricketer Ben Stokes thrown out before an Ashes series. So I am going to assume he will be there to the end.
Whatever the merits of the case, it is a fact that his presence will be crucial for the Boks to stand a chance of success as you can’t replace his experience and he was a crucial part of the Bok forward machine that laid down such a strong marker against the Italians.
He delivered an outstanding performance, and the Boks wouldn’t be nearly as formidable a force without him.