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.

Maybe I’m not empathetic enough and some people cope with losing differently from me, but I’ve always thought that if you lose a game of professional rugby, especially a Test match, you shouldn’t be acting as if you’ve just lost a friendly game of table tennis, laughing and joking over a few beers. If you’re not hurt and angry after losing, you don’t care enough and losing again won’t bother you.

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.

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.