More cause for optimism was SARU’s decision to scrap the 30-cap overseas rule. Instead, home-based players would get top-up payments from SARU according to a new ranking system. Players could still earn more overseas, which is why even more left in 2018, including Franco Mostert for Gloucester, but at least there was some incentive to remain in South Africa and Rassie now had hundreds more players to choose from.

There were only five foreign-based players in Rassie’s first 43-man squad, but that number would rise over the next few years, with the likes of Cobus Reinach (Northampton), Faf de Klerk (Sale), Willie le Roux (Wasps), Vincent Koch and Schalk Brits (both Saracens), being brought back in from the cold.

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.”

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.

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.

9: Lion Taming

“Our 46-man squad for the series included 22 overseas-based players, a significant increase from the 2019 world cup. Putting aside whether that reflected well on South Africa’s domestic rugby, the overseas players brought different perspectives and insider knowledge to the Bok set-up. It was almost as if we had spies in the Lion’s ranks because the guys who played in Europe had played with or against pretty much everyone in their squad. They had first-hand experience of how they did things, their strengths and weaknesses, which is very different from watching players on tapes.