CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — This Rugby World Cup was always the ultimate goal for the Springboks coaching combination of Rassie Erasmus and Jacques Nienaber, who sat down soon after taking over a struggling team in early 2018 and began plotting a five-year plan to build a squad for France in 2023.
South Africa's victory at the 2019 World Cup — a surprise and immediate reward — was actually just “a bonus,” Erasmus said.
“2023 ... was always how we planned,” Erasmus, now South Africa's director of rugby, told the Springboks players when they gathered in February for their first training camp of the World Cup year. “We were looking at our squad age, when the guys are going to mature, what we have to bring in.
“We worked for 2022 and 2021 and 2020. But we planned for 2023."
The defending champion Springboks have set sights on becoming just the second team to win back-to-back Rugby World Cups after New Zealand in 2011 and 2015. There’s also the motivation of becoming the first to claim four titles and overtake great rivals the All Blacks. Erasmus and Nienaber — who have worked together for more than 15 years at various teams — want to end their partnership on the highest of highs.
Coach Nienaber will leave his job after the World Cup. Erasmus' future as director of rugby, having passed the head coach mantle to Nienaber in 2020, is unclear but his contract expires next year. The core of the Springboks squad are also in their early 30s and unlikely to see another World Cup.
It all gives this tournament the feel of an era-ender for the Boks.
The long-term plan Erasmus and Nienaber put in place more than five years ago targeting South Africa's first game of the 2023 World Cup against Scotland on Sept. 10 in Marseille has showed signs of working out. The Springboks appear to be peaking as planned after serving up a 52-16 hammering of Wales and a record 35-7 win over New Zealand in their final two warmups.
But the road to get there was not always smooth, with Erasmus and Nienaber catching regular and sometimes fierce criticism at home for constantly tinkering with the Springboks' lineup in big tests. Those tactics culminated in South Africa making wholesale changes for every one of its three games in the Rugby Championship in July.
Nienaber was adamant they always picked a South Africa team they believed was capable of winning, but accepted there were often risks with giving a group of more than 40 players almost equal game time in big matches.
“We might be wrong. We will actually only be right if we win the World Cup,” Nienaber said. “If we don’t win the World Cup, we’ll say this is the (worst) plan in the world. But that’s what we decided.”
Some games didn't go as planned, but it's left the Springboks with more depth than they've ever had heading to a World Cup and better-placed, Nienaber said, to deal with three big setbacks — the loss to injury of flyhalf Handre Pollard, creative outside center Lukhanyo Am and lock and lineout leader Lood de Jager, who all started the 2019 final.
While there are a number of players ready to step in for Am and de Jager in France, the Springboks have put faith in just one in the No. 10 jersey: Manie Libbok, who made his first test start in July but is the only specialist flyhalf in the squad. Nienaber has backed him to be the creative leader of a backline that contains more try-scoring threats out wide in Cheslin Kolbe, Makazole Mapimpi, Kurt-Lee Arendse and Canan Moodie than South Africa is used to having.
What hasn't changed is the Boks' obsession with a sometimes brutal forward dominance that will again be at the center of the gameplan in France.
All eight of the Springboks' likely first-choice pack in 2023 played some part in the 2019 final, including captain Siya Kolisi, who has returned from knee surgery to lead the squad again and be among nine Boks set to appear in their third Rugby World Cups.
In the weeks before this World Cup, critics revived their complaints that South Africa's attritional, grinding, ultra-physical approach does nothing to boost rugby as a spectacle, especially at its showcase event.
The Springboks have never cared, with veteran No. 8 Duane Vermeulen repeating a reality about the game they play. “It's in our DNA,” he said.
In that first team talk of 2023 in February, Erasmus boiled down what all the intricate planning over the last half-a-decade was about; winning and nothing else.
No matter their opponents, Erasmus said, the Springboks must be ready to “go to war, rip their soul out, beat them, go lift that trophy, and drink on the bus tour."
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