Rassie Erasmus says that the Springboks will continue to innovate and won’t ditch their expansive approach to the game.
In 2024, former All Blacks fly-half Tony Brown joined Erasmus’ coaching team and has been tasked with rebuilding the Bok attack as they aim to complete a Rugby World Cup three-peat.
He has been successful for the most part, adding width to the Springboks‘ attack, with the side also more willing to keep the ball in hand.
However, South Africa’s willingness to keep the ball in hand was blamed for the 22-38 defeat, with the hosts running themselves off their feet.
Australia’s style of play
Despite the historic loss, the Springboks won’t be ditching their tactics and will continue to innovate in the build-up to the World Cup, Erasmus stated.
Meanwhile, he believes that the Wallabies have adopted similar tactics to those that the Springboks used in 2019 to win the Rugby World Cup, backing their defensive system, kicking game and turnover attack.
“I feel Australia are playing pretty much like we did in 2019, defend, defend, and if you make an error, they will pounce on that,” Erasmus said on Tuesday.
“We don’t believe that’s the way to win the next World Cup. We will never throw everything out; we’ve worked too hard over the last two or three years to get things in place. On Saturday, we just got overexcited, we felt that this is working and that we must put the foot on the accelerator, and we ran ourselves off our feet.
“I believe that it is a myth that defence tires you out. On defence, you don’t have to worry about the ball. So you can actually rest on defence. But if you run yourself off your feet, when you have to defend after a turnover, you are all flat and altitude is gone. We were chasing our own tail, and they were really good, but we can’t throw away all that hard work; it was one loss.
“It’s very bad, not lekker to lose, but we have to have clarity. Tony has worked very well today, and we planned well yesterday with our kicking plan. The players on the field this week, I think they understand how we want to play the game.”
He added: “There isn’t an alignment issue. When we talked about the game over the last few days, everyone was saying the same thing. We all know what happened on Saturday; it’s no secret, we overplayed.”
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Springboks changes
Last week, Erasmus said that the team for the second Test against Australia in Cape Town had already been named internally. However, he confirmed that the defeat at Ellis Park led to a rethink.
The likes of Ethan Hooker, Morne van den Berg and Vincent Koch were all set to play in the round two fixture, and while the coaching team changed their minds, Erasmus said it isn’t too far from the original matchday squad named.
“RG Synman and Ruan Nortje were always starting, and we like to think those guys are close enough, and they help each other and push each other really hard during the week to perform on Saturday, and that didn’t happen last weekend,” he explained.
“So if we throw out all our plans that we had just because we got beaten very badly by the Wallabies, then we won’t believe in what we’re doing. We are sticking 90% to our guns on what we wanted to do.
“We would like Eben, RG and Salmaan [Moerat], who is unfortunately injured now, we’d like those three guys to push each other and fight for that spot, but also share that jersey in the same way with Damian de Allende and Andre Esterhuizen.
“It’s nice to have the squad depth, and it’s nice to play the guys and get them Test caps under their belt. But when we lose, we have to break a little bit, but those guys now have a lekker opportunity. RG hasn’t started for us in a very long time. Ruan played a lot of games last year, and there are a few guys who get the opportunity now.”