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.

7: Rassie United

“‘In this team’, he said, ‘transformation is about more than certain guys playing because they’re black or white, it’s about accepting and respecting each other’s cultures.’ Because if we did that, he said, people would feel comfortable being themselves and play better on the weekend. As such, we’d be more likely to win together, and the more we won together, the quicker we’d transform the mindset of the South African public.

Rassie had a set of rules that every player had to abide by but he also knew he couldn't treat everyone the same. An Afrikaner who went back to farm school in the Boland is likely to be different from a black guy who grew up in a township or someone from a wealthy family who attended an exclusive school in Cape Town. The coaching staff understood that they had to be empathetic to individual needs within a framework that applied to everyone.

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.

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.