“We’ve got fucking 58 murders a day,” Rassie Erasmus told his South Africa players in the Tokyo dressing room in 2019. “Women get raped every day. These guys have got 120 million people and they’re one of the richest countries in the world. It’s pissing me off that they think this gives them the right. These guys do it because they want to grow the game of rugby. We want to do it because we want to save our fucking country.”
Really, you have to marvel at the kind of oratorical flourish that manages to cast Japan – perhaps the most adored team to take the field in a Rugby World Cup – as the villains in their home tournament. But then this has always been one of the curious gifts of Erasmus, the coach who led the Springboks to glory four years ago and who now, as director of rugby, remains the power behind Jacques Nienaber’s throne.
South Africa has often played its best stuff in the face of adversity and scepticism. When it has an enemy to rally against. And for all his other virtues as a coach, there is nobody better than Erasmus at finding them.
For many fans in Britain their impressions of Erasmus will be largely coloured by the extraordinary 62-minute video outburst that was leaked during the most recent Lions tour, picking apart the performance of referee Nic Berry. Erasmus received a two-month ban from all rugby activity for the video and would later admit in his autobiography that he “fucked up”. Even so, he insisted he would still film the video again, arguing that he had achieved his primary objective of drawing World Rugby’s attention to the way his team was being refereed.
The end justifying the means: in a way, this has been the common thread running through Erasmus’s life, from his earliest days in the Eastern Cape town of Despatch, where, as he put it “people have a knack for fighting”. His neighbours had a set of boxing gloves, and so he would stand on their front lawn, challenging anybody who walked past to a fight. His father was an emotionally abusive alcoholic who during one of his stupors came after him with a rifle. Erasmus was raised in a world where men had to prove themselves: not for praise or approval, but because it was what they did.
At 92kg Erasmus was slight for a flanker, and so he quickly realised he would need to stand out in other ways: bravery, competitiveness, deception, intelligence. He took out a bank loan so he could purchase a state-of-the-art video analysis system from Israel that would allow him to study not just opponents but potential rivals for his place. Long before he ever became a coach, there was a coaching mind at work: a ruthlessness and an obsession with the smallest details that might prove the difference.
You see it now in South Africa’s embrace of technology, or in the cryptic traffic light system that its coaching team have used at this tournament to communicate with the pitch. The idea actually originated almost two decades ago when Erasmus was coaching the Cheetahs, with each colour assigned to a specific action, such as a drive or a kick to touch.
Everything here is plans and contingencies. Nothing is wasted or accidental. Early in the 2019 final against England, Erasmus realised that referee Jérôme Garcès was policing the breakdown particularly strongly, and so instructed Kolisi to remind his players of the rules, but loudly and within earshot of Garcès.
South Africa know they are not the most popular team at this tournament. “We don’t want to be this wonderful-playing rugby team that the whole world loves,” Erasmus has said. And in a way this outsider status has been folded into the team’s self-image, a siege mentality trained to feast on the merest grudge or slight.
The All Blacks have their myth. France had their romance and the home crowd. Ireland and Scotland had the cooing admiration of the neutral. Argentina have their underdog appeal. Meanwhile South Africa will simply keep doing their thing, aware that this generation will never get to play a World Cup on home soil, and so taking a sadistic pleasure in dumping out the last two hosts.
Now for a different kind of challenge. England under Steve Borthwick are playing the sort of dour, everyone-hates-us system rugby that might even be interpreted as a pale facsimile of what South Africa have been building for years. But there is precious room for complacency here against one of their oldest and bitterest rivals. “The players like scoring points against England,” coach Jake White answered in 2007 when asked why his team had kicked for goal at 33-0 rather than going for another try.
Of course in the build-up to Saturday’s semi-final Erasmus has been on the warpath again: picking fights, seeing slights. He reeled off the XV he expected England to name (ultimately getting three of them wrong). He baited a journalist from New Zealand in sexist terms, derisively referring to him as “her” on social media.
Ahead of the game against France he accused them of simulating high hits to influence referees. These are the sorts of antics that have led former players like John Smit to accuse their former coach of making South Africa “easy to dislike”. You suspect that for the irascible Erasmus, there could be no higher praise.
