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.

Going into the game, we knew they were going to kick almost every time they got the ball and that we were just going to kick it back. Rassie said more than once, ‘Don’t get bored of the plan,’ because he knew the team that ran out of patience first would probably end up losing. You have to be very disciplined to carry out such a simple, some might say limited, game plan. It’s particularly difficult if you’re a winger or full back whose first instinct is to run into space, and it takes only one have-a-go hero going off script to ruin things.

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.

10: Love and Fresh Perspectives

“Rassie and Jacques genuinely thought those guys were good enough to beat Wales, and the fact that we ended up losing that second Test when we should have put it to bed by halftime was neither here nor there in the grand scheme of things.