If there is a lesson to be taken from the third episode of Chasing the Sun, which was aired on M-Net on Sunday night, it was that self-belief and an outward appearance of calmness even when you yourself are boiling over internally is the key to keeping a team tracked for World Cup glory.
It didn’t take long for the television interviewers after South Africa’s defeat at the hands of the All Blacks in the opening game of the 2019 Rugby World Cup to point out to Erasmus that history was against him.
“No team has ever won the World Cup after losing the first game, what do you say to that?”Erasmus didn’t bat an eyelid before issuing his confident, poised reply: “That’s a challenge we will take on head on, history is there to break.”
That was the line that Erasmus pedalled in the post-match press conference too, and what he told the players immediately post-game.
From first-hand experience of interviewing some of the players immediately after that defeat, I can vouch that the message filtered through quickly: the likes of Handre Pollard and Damian de Allende were disappointed but, even just half an hour after tasting the bitter pill of defeat to their arch-rivals, definitely not bowed as they promised to rectify their mistakes and beat the All Blacks next time, which they still firmly believed would be in the World Cup final.
RASSIE VENTED HIS ANGER IN THE BOX
Yet in the hour or so before that, behind the window of the coach’s box, Erasmus was anything but the calm diplomat we saw afterwards.
Instead of feigned diplomacy and magnanimity there were the sort of expletives directed at the refereeing of Frenchman Jerome Garces that would have matched the invective filling the rooms of millions of South African households.
If you haven’t watched this episode of Chasing the Sun yet but want to watch it but don’t enjoy expletives be warned: The raw emotion that is shown here is real, in the moment and there is no censorship.
The many Bok fans who wanted to throw things at their television sets in frustration during the game were only doing what Erasmus himself was doing in the coaching box in Yokohama.
It started from the first scrum, rather tamely compared to what was to come: “We were not under pressure in that scrum, we should have got the scrum penalty.”
Not angry words, but expressed with a tone of indignation and growing frustration.
Indeed, as the television commentators picked up quite quickly, it was indeed the All Blacks infringing. New Zealand prop Joe Moody went down on his knee on three occasions. He wasn’t sanctioned, and instead it was the Boks who were pinged in the scrums by the referee.
It was when it started to become a trend that the expletives really started.
“Is this ref @£$%£ blind?” That was from the coach at the time, but hooker Bongi Mbonambi repeated it for us again in his interview with the Chasing the Sun crew.
Eventually when it became too much for Erasmus, he bawled out that Duane Vermeulen needed to do his bit by taking the referee on.
“Tell Duane to go and ask the referee who got dominance in that scrum!”
Vermeulen acknowledged that he was the man who had to ask the difficult questions and become a pest to the referees during the World Cup.“I was the bad cop, I had to go to the referee and ask the bad questions, the hard questions, the difficult questions,” said Vermeulen, who added that sometimes he found it hard to control himself through his anger and would often swear himself.
Loosehead prop Steven Kitshoff explained why that anger and frustration was so understandable.
“Putting the other okes on the back foot the whole time but you are not receiving rewards is very frustrating,” says Kitshoff. “And it is also emotionally draining. You start thinking does this referee have something against us because it seems he doesn’t want us to get any points.”
It was a frustrating stage of the game for the Boks. Through the mists of time, and because there were other moments at the World Cup that for obvious reasons stick more firmly in the memory bank for South Africans, it is easy to forget just how dominant the Boks were in the first quarter of that crucial World Cup opening game.
Chasing the Sun brings it back, with the All Blacks looking under huge pressure as their time and space to make decisions was cut down and they were harried backwards and forced to play from behind the advantage line.
“We understood that we were all over New Zealand, that we had their number, but we just couldn’t lay the killer blow,” recalled Bok forwards coach Matt Proudfoot.
FIVE BAD MINUTES DOESN’T DEFINE A WORLD CUP
That was indeed the perception of those of us sitting in the press box in the Yokohama Stadium that night. It felt like just a matter of time before the Boks would make the pressure toll and start wracking up the points.
But we all know the All Blacks and their propensity to feed on your mistakes and hurt you, and that is what happened.
“We made two mistakes in the space of five minutes and suddenly we were 17-3 down and playing massive catch-up with a14-point deficit,” said defence coach Jacques Nienaber of the two against-the-run-of-play tries scored by New Zealand that effectively won them the match.
But while a bitter pill to swallow, Proudfoot put it in perspective: “Five minutes of poor rugby doesn’t define your World Cup, it doesn’t tell you that your plan doesn’t work, on the contrary the game told us it did.”
What must have been particularly galling for Erasmus and company was that they had spent much of the build-up week to that game speaking about the referee.
Garces did not have a record that favoured South Africa when he officiated in their games before that tournament, in the sense that he tended to preside over more Bok defeats than victories. And their record with him as the referee against the All Blacks was shocking.
But one of the masterstrokes of Erasmus’s coaching and management of his troops at the World Cup was how he retained his self belief and calm demeanour once the battle was over.
And also, as highlighted before in reviews of what we’ve seen on Chasing the Sun, his frank honesty.
“I can’t fault your effort tonight, I can’t fault your effort over the last few weeks, and that was definitely not the reason we lost tonight,” Erasmus told the players in the post-match huddle in the dressing room.
“You have put in a s**t load of effort and done a lot of other things that other teams would have moaned about, like coming here earlier and sacrificing a lot of stuff. Unfortunately it didn’t show on the field and unfortunately obviously there is something that I f….. up somewhere. We will go back and look to see why we couldn’t execute, why we did things outside our normal. But they are things that are fixable. We lost to the best team in the world and we almost clawed back in those last 15 minutes, thanks for the effort.”
BELIEF NEVER FALTERED
Very quickly Erasmus got through the message that although a game that the Boks had prepared so intensely for had gone against them, he was still convinced he had the team to win the World Cup.
“We created more chances than in Wellington (when the Boks drew with the All Blacks) and in Pretoria (the previous year) and in the previous game in Wellington (when the Boks won). I really believe we can win the World Cup. In fact, I believe it 100%,” he told his men in a subsequent team meeting.
Tendai ‘Beast’ Mtawarira remembered Erasmus telling them that they had four big games left - against Italy in the Pool phase, the quarterfinal, the semifinal and the final - to go out “and change your lives and drink from the Cup”.Flyhalf Handre Pollard summed up the typical South African rugby mindset that drove the team after that.
“When there is no way back and we have to go through every wall in front of us that is I think when we South Africans are at our best,” said Pollard.
MAPIMPI FURORE UNIFIED THE TEAM
There’s also nothing more unifying for a Bok team than to start feeling everyone is against them, something that came about because of the reaction of some people on social media who, as is sadly too often typical of that medium, let their knees jerk before their brains could think when wing Makazole Mapimpi was apparently shunned by teammates after a Pool game.
The players spoke about the media reaction but it wasn’t really the mainstream media, at least not those of us who were in Japan who were close enough to know it worked, who started the storm that led Erasmus to say that he had the wind taken out of his sails.
Mapimpi and Lukhanyo Am both explained in Chasing the Sun what happened there, about the culture that had been developed among the so-called Bomb Squad (reserves) and the jokes emanating from it.
And made it clear that what they felt was an untenable situation where they felt they just couldn’t win no matter what they did when it came to some of their fans just strengthened their team unity.
The team unity and unity of purpose that ultimately won them rugby’s biggest prize.
- Catch Episode 4 of 5 next Sunday, 25 October, only on MNet on DStv Premium. Watch episodes one, two and three on Catch Up . . .