Rassie Erasmus has no choice but to win World Cup after latest claim
As everyone in the rugby world knows, Rugby Onslaught are by far and away the masters at being able to read between the lines with Rassie Erasmus interviews and Twitter posts and understand what the South Africa director of rugby is actually saying.
Sometimes he is quite blunt – for example, and hour-long video ranting about referees – and sometimes he is quite subtle. His latest interview is leaning on the subtle side, but we still think most people will understand what the World Cup winning coach was saying recently when talking to SuperSport.
Erasmus was talking about how teams that are building for a World Cup, or any period in the future, need to experiment with their team from time to time. But what he was actually saying was ‘the only reason the Springboks have lost over the past four years is because we purposely fielded a weaker team.’
Here was us thinking it was the referees’ fault most of the time, but it was actually due to the teams he picked. But he picked those teams on purpose for the sake of building towards the World Cup. As a result, he has not choice but to win the World Cup.
“I think sometimes there was a lot of pressure for us to stick to our guns,” Erasmus said. “It’s not just emotional pressure, it’s not wanting to drop South African supporters, it’s not like taking a Test match and pretending it’s less important than other Test matches, but I think if you really want to make sure you try and peak four years later, five years later, three years later, you have to build and experiment sometimes a little bit. When we experiment, people think, and I did too, you’re not valuing this opposition, but it’s not the case. We’ve always thought the teams we’ve picked had a good chance of winning that Test match. So sometimes the pressure was there to deviate. When I look back at matches where we mixed a matched a little bit to find out more about the player, to find out more about the opposition, I think we pretty much stuck to our guns. But there were times where we did change our minds a little bit when the momentum was starting to shift away from us.”
Take a look:
🗣️ “I think we stuck to our guns but there were times when we did change our mind a little bit when the momentum shifted away from us.”
Rassie Erasmus on trying to create a Springbok team that peaks at a World Cup and experimenting with new players.. pic.twitter.com/o7h71pyYN9
— SuperSport Rugby (@SSRugby) June 9, 2023
