Springboks coaches Rassie Erasmus and Jacques Nienaber have explained why they moved from their traditional team announcements for the Rugby World Cup quarter-final against France.
Leading up to Test matches, teams typically announce their matchday lineups at least 48 hours in advance.
However, since the 2019 World Cup, the Springboks coaches made a point of revealing their hands early and named their teamsheets on the Tuesday before a Test match.
The move was to stop speculation around the teams and with the Bok coaching team already deciding the lineup by that point and had announced it to the team, they believed that it might as well go out early.
Keeping it quiet
However, they changed this tactic ahead of the 2023 Rugby World Cup quarter-final against France with Nienaber and Erasmus citing the size of Fabien Galthie’s coaching and analytical team for the change.
“We normally get to the team out nice and early but this time, we only did it on the Thursday. We changed our team announcement from doing it earlier in the week, to only doing it later or 72 hours before the game – like all the other teams do,” Nienaber said in a Betway exclusive snippet from the Chasing the Sun 2 documentary.
“And the reason was we didn’t want our team to get out and them to prepare because they have like 14 analysts.
“So the moment your team is out there, they can take a player and just pull the profile.”
The Springboks would also make a few surprising selections for the crunch fixture, returning to a more traditional 5-3 split for the match despite the fire-power the French had, particularly up front.
While many predicted that Handre Pollard would start the match, but it was Manie Libbok who started instead, along with another shock in Cobus Reinach at scrum-half instead of Faf de Klerk.
Mixing and match
In episode three of the series, Erasmus notes that the Springboks were a difficult team to analyse because of all the changes they made to their matchday 23 in the build-up to and during the competition.
He reiterated that sentiment again in the snippet.
“I thought the mixing and matching of teams not always playing the same [players], even when we played the All Blacks at Twickenham that was with a totally different team,” Erasmus said.
Any team that possessed any kind of information on us must have found it more difficult as a result.
“When you play with four nines and a nine at 10, and a flank at hooker and lock at flank and so forth, and at 10 at 12 or 12 at 15. Because there are less minutes to identify a trend, it is a little harder for that [study] to have any effect.
Nienaber continued, “They couldn’t say it’s going to be Manie [Libbok], Handre Pollard, Damian Willemse at fly-half, or Faf [de Klerk] at fly-half from the squads we selected prior to the quarterfinal. Because all four of those guys play in the World Cup’s build-up to the quarterfinal.
French resources were split
With Willie Le Roux and Damian Willemse sharing the fullback jersey, the Springboks coaches noted that they weren’t just keeping the French guessing at fly-half. They also mentioned that after Makazole Mapimpi was injured, 2019 World Cup star Lukhanyo Am returned to the team, raising doubts about Jesse Kriel’s ability to continue starting, and that Canan Moodie also excelled in the role against the All Blacks and during the pool stages.
Because we cycled so frequently, Nienaber continued, “their resources were divided.”
“This is the reason we delayed our team announcement so much; in the end, they only had two days to learn about the opponent team and their profiles.”
