Gatland made the stunning claim in his latest Telegraph column where he claimed that the Springboks rented a house near that overlooked the Lions’ training ground.

Gatland’s claim

He stated that a long-lense camera was mounted at the top of the house to record and take pictures of the training sessions to gain a competitive advantage.

The former Wales boss felt that the team was being spied on during the tour and his fears were confirmed when Lukhanyo Am made a ball and all tackle on Elliot Daly from set play.

Gatland states that the Lions hadn’t run the play during the tour, but was suspicious how the midfielder read it so cleanly and made the tackle.

“Our suspicions grew in the first Test, when Lukhanyo Am hit Elliot Daly with a massive man-and-ball tackle, reading a move that we had not used before during the tour matches,” Gatland wrote.

He added: “Rassie was also on the pitch acting as a ‘water boy,’ carrying a piece of paper. One of the photographers got a picture of him holding the page standing beside Faf de Klerk, their scrum-half, and after the game, we enlarged the photo, which showed that there were some of our moves and calls on it.”

“The first Test experience seemed to confirm our fears. We just didn’t know how they could have so much information on us. We started training indoors in a gym to negate the suspicion we had of being watched. But we still felt we were being filmed.

“Our concern was that they were using a long-range lens to video us from somewhere nearby.”

Rassie hits back

Erasmus has responded to Gatland’s claims on the social media platform X, his first of three posts addressing the Am tackle.

“Lukie [Lukhanyo Am] dit really well to read that one skip pass(we call that a 100) Exceptional read to see the one skip pass and make the tackle!” He wrote.

Erasmus followed that up with a post featuring the picture that was in Gatland’s column, where the Springboks had supposedly got hold of the Lions’ calls.

“Damn they manage to decipher our Afrikaans game plan! Kudos to you! Great spying,” the Springboks head coach quipped in the caption.

He then took another swipe at the former Wales boss with a sarcastic post suggesting that Wales photographed the Springboks’ gameplans after the team was evacuated from their hotel during their 2021 end of year tour.

“I hear from a source from within the wales camp that whilst we were evacuated all our notes and plans were photographed and the white board sheets taken. We were again forced at around 06h00 for another evacuation!!” his post read.