“They were all good soccer players, but they knew they weren’t great. And most of them were playing for fun, they weren’t dreaming of getting on airplanes and being a professional athlete like I was. “Doesn’t matter what you say. You can’t understand,” I’d say to them. “I can see light with my running. All of you are here just chasing a ball around a field. Where’ that going to take you?” I had to be as harsh with them as they were being with me. I wanted to live in a proper city, travel the world, be known and appreciated for my talents.

As time went on, I worked out that opponents were going out of their way to get under my skin and I learnt to laugh it off – you’ll usually see a big grin on my face when pushing and showing breaks out. Having said that, I’ll always get upset if I see someone taking a liberty with a teammate.

McCaw knew the laws inside out and was a genius at judging how a referee would interpret the breakdown, which is why he was able to push the boundaries while not getting penalised as much as some people thought he should have been. He also had good people skills. He didn’t complain about every little mistake because he knew that might irritate the referee and 50-50 decisions might start going against his team. And by flagging things only when he really needed to, always calmly and clearly, he made referees think, He hasnt said much until now, maybe I did get that wrong.

People who call McMaw a cheat don’t know what they’re talking about, I also learnt how important it was to know the laws (especially in my department), push boundaries, not pester a referee, and complain in a respectful manner only when I thought he’d really screwed up.

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.