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 made six changes to his starting line-up for the game against the Wallabies in Brisbane but we still came up short, making it four losses in seven games since he took over. Newspapers were already talking about a crisis, with Rassie’s chopping and changing coming in for a lot of criticism. What people didn’t realise was that he wasn’t mixing things up for the sake of it, there was science behind it. Rassie’s aim was to build combinations and find out what worked best for the team and he was putting players in tough situations to find out whether they belonged at that level. If they didn’t, he’d weed them out.

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.

Rassie homed in on the fact that black players liked to sing and dance before a game while white players preferred peace and quiet (in South African rugby, you don’t really get guys who scream, shout and headbutt walls). He’d noticed that some plates were irritated by the singing and dancing and realised that a compromise needed to be struck.

One of the keys to our improvement under Rassie was the addition to his coaching staff of Welshman Aled Walters as head of athletic performance.

Like Jacques Nienaber, Aled had been with Rassie at Munster, and when he joined the Springbok set-up in 2018 he didn’t think we were fit enough.