4: Devastation

“Biggar went off with a head injury with 6 minutes to go, and from the next scrum Duane Vermeulen broke blind and gave a sneaky back-hand pass to Fourie du Preez, who scored in the corner. That wasn’t a planned move – the scrum just skewed slightly, Duane picked up the ball and Fourie noticed there was no one defending the blind side.

Some people thought Wales were unlucky but that’s not how I saw it. Winning games is always a team effort but some games come down to individual brilliance. And great players produce those X-factor moments when they’re needed most, just as Fourie and Duane did that day. It wasn’t just that Duane produced that back-hand pass, it was also that he read the situation while holding off a defender at the back of a wheeling scrum. As for Fourie, he had the IQ to know Duane was going to pass the ball, and he was deft enough to run that line without any Welsh defenders picking him up.

It’s comforting to know you’ve got guys like that on the pitch, players who aren't going to keep battering on the door, to no avail, but have it in them to pick the lock instead.

Looking back on our squad for that tour, it seems incredible that things went so badly. Loads of those guys are now considered to be Springbok greats – Beast, Willie le Roux, Damien de Allende, Pieter-Steph du Toit, Lood de Jager, Vincent Koch, Bongi Mbonambi, Steven Kitshoff, Franco Mostert, Faf de Klerk.

We were a mess, light years away from being the best in the world. Some pundits claimed we were the worst Springbok team in history. We’d lost eight Test matches in a calendar year for the first time, and in almost every game our opponents set some new record against us: our first defeat by Ireland at home, our first defeat by the Pumas in Argentina, our biggest defeat by the All Blacks, our first defeat by Italy, our biggest defeat by Wales.

The whole Springbok organisation was probably to blame – players, coaching staff, management – because nothing was aligning.

Occasionally you play a game where everything goes the opposition’s way and nothing goes yours, and that was certainly the case in Albany. At the same time, the All Blacks were ruthlessly efficient at turning lucky breaks into points. And like a batsman who can score all around the wicket, they accumulated points almost without you noticing, so that you’d look up at the scoreboard and think, How the hell did that happen?

They weren’t necessarily spectacular (although they did score a few outstanding tries), they just made the most of every scoring opportunity. And the more we felt the game slipping away from us, the more desperate we became, and suddenly we were doing things we didn’t normally do – running everything, trying risky passes and offloads, making more and more mistakes. And instead of the mistakes being in their half, they were in our half and the All Blacks gleefully seized on them. In the end, the only sensible option was to batten down the hatches and hope it didn’t get too ugly and humiliating. But we left it too late.

I suggested to the coaches that we should do something to relieve the tension, otherwise the guys would go crazy holed up in their hotel rooms. So I invited all the forwards to a spit braai at my house on the Monday, with a live band and instructions to relax and not talk about rugby.

As the week progressed, I knew I had to do everything in my power to give the team an edge. To that end, I wrote a note for each player, telling them that they were going to play great at the weekend. And on the day of the game, I left a note on each player’s locker, letting them know that I still backed them and honestly believed we could beat New Zealand, despite what happened in Albany.

I already knew from my experience at the 2015 World Cup that a couple of weeks is a long time in rugby, but I’m not sure anyone thought we had hope of bouncing back from a 57-point deficit against the All Blacks, especially since neither team had changed much in terms of personnel. But this time we were able to snuff out a couple of early try-scoring opportunities and gain a foothold.

We were leading with 12 minutes to go, until a magical try by All Black full back Damian McKenzie and late penalty by Sopoaga. Malcolm Marx barged over for a try at the death and the conversion made it 24-25 but they managed to hold on for the win, their sixth in a row against us. The All Blacks had won all six of their games for their fifth title in six years, while we’d finished third behind Australia, with two wins, two draws and two defeats.

I’d been speaking to Siya quite a lot and hearing only good things about the new regime, but nothing could prepare me for my first proper sitdown team meeting with Rassie at Kings Park. For the previous few years, journalists and pundits had been imploring the Boks to develop a more sophisticated game – play more like the All Blacks, in other words – and here was Rassie saying physicality was the very essence of South African rugby; and rather than doing something different, he thought that we needed to double down.

As far as Rassie was concerned, we could spend lots of time working on other parts of the game and still lose more matches than we won, but if we focused on making our big rock more solid we’d win more games than we’d lose. Then, once we’d nailed the physical stuff, we could start thinking about adding bells and whistles. As you can imagine, all this talk of physicality was great to hear for us as players, and I left that meeting thinking, This guy is the real deal.”