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.

5: No Way Back?

“But while Allister thought we needed to be a bit more expansive, that was easier said than done.

Different times have what South Africans call their ‘big rocks’, and the Springboks’ big rocks had always been a good defensive system, a solid set piece and a physical pack. I was still young and my understanding of the game wasn’t what it would become, but in hindsight we should have just improved those big rocks and fine-tuned as we went along. Instead, we neglected them, thinking we could suddenly be like the All Blacks. If only sport was that simple.

New Zealanders play rugby the way they do because they were raised in a certain culture. Playing expansive, attacking rugby is in their DNA, and even it was no longer paying dividends they’d never dream of playing like the Springboks. Instead, they’d work hard to improve on what they did best. In the same way, it would be madness for a country like Fiji to try to play like the Boks because their rugby DNA is speed, athleticism and flair. Yes, they need to work on their set piece and game management, but the most important thing for them, and try any sporting team, is to adhere to an identity.

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’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.”