Upcoming attractions at the 50-seat Salle Jean D’Arc theatre in the little village of Presles, an hour north of Paris, include an amateur cabaret, an evening of improv theatre and a recital by a local mezzo soprano. But, on Tuesday at least, South Africa’s current director of rugby, former head coach, and sometime waterboy, Rassie Erasmus, had the stage all to himself.
Erasmus entered through the black backdrop, stage right, and took a seat in the middle of the spotlit top table arranged between the red velvet drapes. He didn’t bring his disco lights with him, but it was still some performance.
For his first trick, Erasmus named Steve Borthwick’s team for the semi-final, which he just happened to have written down on a piece of paper he had brought in with him. It didn’t take two invitations to get him to read it out for the cameras. “Genge, George, Sinckler,” he began, “Itoje, Chessum, Lawes, Curry, Earl, Mitchell, Farrell, Daly, Tuilagi, Marchant, May, Marcus Smith or Steward.” And then, just for good measure, he ran through the bench too: “Marler, Cole, George, Billy, Ben Youngs or Danny, George Ford, and Ollie. That’s who we think. But we might be totally wrong.”
Erasmus had, he explained, been doing a few quick calculations about how evenly matched the two teams were likely to be. “The average caps in our team will be around 54, for theirs around 59. The average age for us 30, for them 29, the average weight for us, 104kg, for them 105kg.”
And this was the kicker: “We average 200 minutes per player, they average 216”, which, you may have noticed, is just a little more of a gap than any of the others he mentioned there. Cut it another way, and what Erasmus was saying was that his team will be just a little fitter and fresher than Borthwick’s, because they have been able to rotate their players.
Most of England’s key men – Maro Itoje, Ollie Chessum, Jamie George, Manu Tuilagi, Ben Earl – are well above that 216-minute mark, much closer to the “300/400-minute” mark Erasmus mentioned, as the point when you begin to “get injuries in certain positions”.
Some of the ways in which South Africa have gone about managing that player rotation have come under scrutiny in the days since their single-point victory against France. There have been suggestions that Erasmus and the rest of South Africa’s coaching team may have been gaming the head injury assessment system by calling their players off for checks on head injuries they had spotted themselves watching from the stands, which allows the injured players a 10-minute break, and also means that while they’re having it they can replace their forwards who had already been subbed off. Erasmus categorically denied it.
“No,” he said, “that would be totally wrong”, and “no”, he would never consider it as a tactic. It was the only short answer he gave.
Erasmus had more to say about England’s motivation heading into the match. “I think they’ll have some beef with us, I think they’ll be very physical,” he said. Fourteen of those players he named were in the 23 beaten by South Africa in the 2019 World Cup final.
“It’s something that will always hurt, when you lose the World Cup,” Erasmus said. “When I was a player we lost the World Cup against Australia, and for the next couple of games we played against Australia we were always thinking, ‘It was you guys who took it away from us.’ England will feel like that, too. ‘You guys took it away from us and we would like to take it back.’”
That, Erasmus said, was “the reality” of the match, never mind what “the media and all the pundits” say. “The English team will have to feel like that, they will not be saying: ‘Hey, come and do it to us again,’ they will really fight to the end.”
Erasmus couldn’t help but mention that the two teams had played since 2019; he seemed to forget the one England won though – 27-26 in 2021 – and mentioned only the one South Africa won, 27-13, a year later. “Eddie’s last game, I think it was,” he added with a smile.
