While the other teams were reviewing missed tackles and dropped balls, Landry instead focused his players’ attention on their wins, however minor. He combed through footage of previous games and created, for each player, a highlight reel of where that player had done something easily, naturally, and effectively. He reasoned that while the number of wrong ways to do something was infinite, the number of right ways, for any particular player, was not. It was finite, and knowable, and the best way to define and know the right way was to look at those plays where the player had done it right.

Morrison relented and hoped Durham would make good on his word. But he also had to convince Silberman to let him work at his own pace. “Try this my way,” he wrote. "Allow me the exotic pleasure this time of calling you first with the work, rather than vice versia [sic]. I am highly conscious of the overhangings. But now that I’ve got the ball, I run faster and better when I give myself the illusion I’m in charge of it and the whistle wont blow before I wrap it up. I beat deadlines when I feel no deadlines.

Maybe you only really understood how good Duane was when you were in the same team as him, because I thought he was the best eighthman in the world and certainly the best I’d played with.

He gave teammates tremendous confidence because he knew exactly what his role was and fulfilled it to the letter, game in, game out.

Rassie didn't do one-on-one meetings with players. Instead we’d turn up to a meeting early in the week and the team would be on the board. He’d go through it, explaining why such and such a player was starting, why such and such a player wasn’t starting and maybe why he would be starting in two weeks’ time. It was an open, honest way of doing things, preferable to explaining his reasoning to individual players behind closed doors, which can breed suspicion.

Rassie was very much the man in charge but he wasn’t a dictator. He didn’t want an environment where some players felt more important than others, he wanted everyone to feel equal. There was still a slight separation of older and younger guys but the younger guys weren't expected to sit in the corner and be quiet.

Besides, he had already weeded out any guys he thought could be a virus. He’d say, ‘The 31 guys in the squad aren’t necessarily the most talented but they’re the right guys for this team.’ He understood that sometimes you had a player who was arguably the best in his position in club rugby but also sulked, moaned about game plans and faculties, talked kak about people and infected the whole environment. Other coaches don't notice those players but Rassie spots them immediately and never considers picking them again.