Before I learned to create a little distance between what I felt and what I needed to express at work, I let too many of my worries and fears leak into my voice and into my daily interactions. Your team amplifies your mood, so when I was frustrated, those feelings rocketed around the office and came back tenfold. The more upset I got with our lack of progress, the more those frustrations infected the rest of the team. So I had to learn to modulate myself. To crank my personal style down a couple of notches to establish an effective management style.

Although I was still a little shy, and not a typical bruiser bouncer, growing up with three brothers meant I knew how to break up a ght. From afar my shyness could be mistaken for arrogance or over-confidence. The first night I was there, a tough-looking woman came up to me and said sneeringly, ‘What do you need to work here, then?’

Putting on my best James Bond face, I fibbed, ‘Three black belts.’ I hadn’t done any martial arts, but she looked shocked and wandered off. She must have told everyone because after that I was always instantly obeyed and continued working as a bouncer during the holidays.

Eben Etzebeth - Unlocked

2: Reluctant Enforcer

“Something else I learnt during that tournament was that some teams are very different beasts in their own backyard than they are away from home. We beat Argentina fairly comfortably at Newlands, but the following week in Mendoza was the most physical game I'd played up to that point. The atmosphere was hostile, more like football than rugby, which made the Argentine players that much more up for it. And the more their players got on top of us, the louder the crowd became. It was like playing in the eye of the storm – 80 minutes of deafening noise and getting clattered from all sides – and we were fortunate to be down only 13-3 at half-time. We escaped with a draw only because of a late charge-down try and conversion from Frans Steyn.

In 2013, we put 70 points past Argentina in Johannesburg, only for the Pumas to almost beat us the following week, again in Mendoza (two late penalties from Morné Steyn gave us a narrow victory). How can a team transform from boys to men in the space of seven days? I can only put it down to the home crowd making their players believe, although all that passion can also make them do the craziest things.

Maybe I’m not empathetic enough and some people cope with losing differently from me, but I’ve always thought that if you lose a game of professional rugby, especially a Test match, you shouldn’t be acting as if you’ve just lost a friendly game of table tennis, laughing and joking over a few beers. If you’re not hurt and angry after losing, you don’t care enough and losing again won’t bother you.

It’s the nature of sport that sometimes you have a bad day, and there were obvious reasons for our under-par performance. But when Rassie took over we weren’t allowed to have excuses. It didn’t matter if we’d been travelling a lot, playing loads of games, training too hard or not training enough, Rassie’s attitude was, ‘You can’t on the one hand say you’d do anything to play for the Boks, that you’d die on the field for your country, and on the other hand say that you didn’t feel quite right. That’s bullshit.