After just about every Rugby World Cup the winners will be able to tell you afterwards that there was a moment along the way where a decision was weighed up that could have subverted their challenge had they made the wrong call.
With South Africa’s first World Cup winning coach, Kitch Christie, it happened in the build-up to the Ellis Park final against the All Blacks and revolved around the tried and trusted game-plan that had got the team captained by Francois Pienaar into the decider.
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Christie had always been sure about which template was the right one, but the Herculean performance put in by massive New Zealand winger Jonah Lomu in the semifinal had him worried.
Some of the players who were there remember the day after that Cape Town semifinal, which the Boks watched on television after having edged out France in the first semifinal the day before, as the first time they ever saw Christie panic. He called a team meeting at which he discussed the option of going into the final with a completely different game-plan.
THE BRAINS GAME
The Bok midweek team had thrashed an Irish selection in Belfast on Christie’s first tour in charge in 1994 playing what he called the Brains Game. It was basically heads up rugby, the players being given the licence to play with instinct and off the cuff, with the emphasis on quickening everything up.
Christie remembered that game in the build-up to the final and wondered if perhaps the element of surprise, which the Boks would have brought if they had opted to go for quick lineouts and tap penalties instead of their more conservative, traditional approach, was his team’s only hope.
History shows that the players talked him out of it. Or maybe they didn’t talk him out of it, for some of the players recall that when they tried to put the game into practice in training, they just completely botched it. Perhaps on purpose. The players weren’t prepared to argue the case with Christie, but they did demonstrate that it was the wrong way to go.
RASSIE’S MOMENT OF DOUBT
The good coaches are the ones that are prepared to listen to their players and to their assistants and consider another view. In the fourth episode of Chasing the Sun, what was made apparent was that Erasmus is perhaps indebted to his assistant coach Mzwandile Stick for his honesty and forthrightness when he, the head coach, was poised to make a big mistake.
It involved South Africa’s X-factor player Cheslin Kolbe, who had gone over on his ankle in the closing stages of the quarterfinal against Japan. Kolbe wasn’t running freely on the Monday that started the build-up to the semifinal against Wales, and Erasmus had always been very strict and open with his players on the topic of their availability when injured.
“If you are not available to participate in the training near the start of the week then you are not considered for the match,” says Erasmus.
So the decision was made to leave Kolbe out, and Sbu Nkosi, the Sharks wing, was included in the starting team when it was announced to the media.
Erasmus never did make any secret in that press conference and in chatting to the touring media afterwards about his concern about not having Kolbe in the team, so perhaps what happened next is forgivable. After all, this was a World Cup. But not from the team principle perspective, and not according to what had been agreed upon between Erasmus and the players.
“We got to the captain’s practice before the game and suddenly Cheslin was running around like a rabbit,” recalled assistant coach Jacques Nienaber.
SAVED BY STICK’S FORTHRIGHTNESS
As the footage shown on Chasing the Sun showed, Kolbe was indeed as fit as a fiddle by that stage of the build-up, and he was running easily and joyously stepping some of his teammates.
“I was thinking of picking Cheslin, but Stokke (Stick) said no, if you do that, you lose the team,” recalled Erasmus.
The Bok coach has a good enough understanding of the player psyche, and how important his honesty was in winning the trust of the players, to probably have known instinctively at the time that Stick was right. But he says he still carried on considering it.
“Even when Stick told me that I would lose the team I was still thinking of it,” said Erasmus.
“I even asked Cheslin if he was good. He responded yes but at the same time he gave me this weird look. It was a look that seemed to say ‘Are you crazy, why are you asking that?’ It was almost as if even if he was okay he wouldn’t have allowed me to select him.”
Stick was emphatic though that it would be the wrong decision.
“It was going against our principles, the players would never have trusted him again had he gone through with that,” says Stick in Chasing the Sun.
“It was the principles of our environment. Rassie had created a good environment for the players to excel, so to go against that could have been problematic.”
Eventually Erasmus took Stick’s advice and is very self-effacing when looking back at that time.
“That’s why I say that coaches always pretend they know everything, but sometimes we don’t know. Sometimes we are not sure. Sometimes we are doubtful. And sometimes we change our minds.”
Erasmus did change his mind, or at least opted not to change the original decision he had made, and while we will never know for sure, history does reflect it as the right call as the Boks did go on to win the World Cup and they did manage to beat Wales without Kolbe.
IMPORTANCE OF BEING A TIGHT-KNIT TEAM
And the importance of being a tight-knit team is expounded again and again, as it was in previous episodes, in episode 4, which deals with the preparation and playing side of the two play-off games against Japan and Wales respectively.
Again, as has been the case in this spell-binding series, the viewers are taken to a place where they are seldom able to go - inside the changeroom, inside the team room for meetings. Look out for the dressing-room scene at halftime of the Japan game, where Duane Vermeulen delivered an expletive riddled but heart-felt speech about the need not to be “@£*%@ negative” as there was no way they were going to win the match if that was the case.
The episode gives us an incite into the playing style the Boks adapted against Japan, with their hard, physical and some would say conservative approach being criticised at the time. But what Erasmus did at the 2019 World Cup was what one of his predecessors as Bok coach, Heyneke Meyer, got wrong at the 2015 World Cup. Not focusing on South African strengths led to the shock defeat to Japan in Brighton.
“The Japanese have a saying 'we want to take it to the dance floor'. We want to take it to the gutters,” said Erasmus in explaining his approach.
“If Japan took us to the dance floor we would struggle. Because they are small little guys, they are nippy. If they get Frans Malherbe to run around and tire him out that way they are taking us to their soul and are taking us away from their soul. We like confrontation, that is our soul, and it is something they (Japan) are not conditioned for.”
He told his team “We need to hammer them with physicality, without a doubt.”
THE MAUL THAT TOOK THE JAPAN TEAM TO A DARK PLACE
The episode gives us an interesting insight into the antecedents of the long driving maul that effectively killed the Japanese challenge in the quarterfinal after their tenacious start to the game. The plan was formed in a two-and-a-half-hour team meeting while Typhoon Hagibis, or at least the outer-reaches of the weather system, was pummeling Kobe, where the Boks remained for a few extra days after the completion of their Pool schedule.
“I told him (Erasmus) that I needed some time to work with the pack on the maul,” recalled forwards coach Matt Proudfoot.
“He asked me if it needed to be done on the field. It just so happened that this coincided with the day that Typhoon Hagibis was hammering Kobe. We were caught up in it so we didn’t go onto the training. Instead we decided ‘let’s talk about mauls’. We went into a room with massive buckets of beer and spoke for two and a half hours just about mauling.”
The Boks employed perhaps the most destructive and long-lasting maul in World Cup history, extending more than half the length of the field, to set up the try scored by Faf de Klerk in the second half that effectively put the Boks out of range on the scoreboard.
It wasn’t just on the scoreboard though, Erasmus knew that being pushed back and manhandled so easily would also break the Japan team’s indomitable spirit.
“That is what broke them,” concluded Erasmus.
And it did.