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.

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.

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.”

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.