Said Ferriola: “We encourage our people not to fear failure. You cannot stretch the limits of your knowledge, your imagination, or your skills, if you’re afraid to fail. It’s very typical to hear a manager or a supervisor coach a new teammate by saying something like: ‘If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing the limits of your abilities.

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.

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.”

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.