Foreword

From my first interactions with Johan 'Rassie' Erasmus way back in the 1990s, I knew he was destined for a post-playing career in elite rugby coaching. It was impossible to miss.

We may not have operated in the same provincial circles, but once Rassie was on the Springbok radar as a player during my coaching stint with the Springboks from 1997, I immediately recognised a tactically inclined and motivated player who was ahead of his time. Even then, Rassie was internalising trends in the game that others were nowhere near seeing. He spent so much time after matches and training sessions studying patterns and footage. He was fascinated by what he discovered and spent hours analysing the opposition. No other player was doing that at the time.

And while it came as no surprise to see him climbing the coaching ranks so rapidly after his playing days, it has been nothing short of remarkable to see what Rassie - with the assistance of his able right-hand man Jacques Nienaber - has achieved with the Springboks.

It is easy to forget what state the Boks were in when Rassie and Jacques arrived back in South Africa. The results in 2016 and 2017 were diabolical, with the Boks taking 50-point defeats to the All Blacks and losing to sides such as Italy and Argentina. Things were as bad as they had ever been, especially considering the proud history that had accompanied the Springboks since their reintroduction to international rugby and the heroics of the 1995 Rugby World Cup - the first of four Webb Ellis Cups that would belong to South Africa.

Being afforded the opportunity to coach the Springboks shortly after that golden period - between 1996 and 2000 - remains the greatest honour of my life, and while I did not taste the World Cup glory bestowed on the late Kitch Christie, Jake White (2007), Rassie Erasmus (2019) and Jacques Nienaber (2023), I was not without a slice of Springbok rugby success.

In winning South Africa's first Tri-Nations (now the Rugby Championship) title in 1998, I oversaw a run of 17 straight Test wins as Springbok coach that remains a South African record. For a long time, it was a joint world record with the All Blacks, too. At the time, and for a long time afterwards, many suggested the Springbok class of that golden generation - 17 in a row with an overall win record of 71% - was the most successful in history.

But after what we have seen in recent years, even my competitive nature can concede to an era of Bok rugby that has far surpassed anything that came before.

I can still find similarities and the small margins that separate good from great. As coaches, Rassie and I both had clear plans regarding our captains, as well as in the teams we wanted to select before taking the job. In my case, the captain was Gary Teichmann, and in Rassie's it was Siya Kolisi. Even while coaching at Boland, I had a clear idea of the Springbok team I wanted to pick, while Rassie, who had been involved in South African rugby structures for a while, would have known exactly what he wanted, too.

Second, in many ways our visions were similar. I wanted to make people proud of the Springboks again after a couple of difficult seasons since the success of 1995, and Rassie's mission was also to restore pride after a few years of defeat and despair. His vision was far bigger than the players themselves, though, or even the team. It was about tapping into the greater South African good, and he has done incredibly well with that.

The other element you have to get right when coaching at this level is to achieve complete trust within your coaching team. My assistant was Alan Solomons, who had been coaching at the Stormers and was previously at the University of Cape Town. Alan was my trusted skills and backline coach. He was older than me and had a calm head. I was the one with all the passion and ideas, but he would plot and plan every practice and make sure we did everything within our frame. He was the details guy; in much the same way, Jacques complements Rassie. It's the perfect balance.

Rassie has not only struck up a great relationship with Jacques but also with his assistant coach, Mzwandile Stick. Between them, there is great understanding and clear respect. Mzwandile is a strong personality and Rassie has identified a strength in him that contributes directly to the national cause.

Mzwandile was the head coach of the under-21 side, but the step up to a Springbok job is enormous, and his success under Rassie has set him up for bigger things. At the age of 40, he has been involved with the Boks for six years, become a double World Cup winner - and there is no telling what heights await him in his Springbok journey. This speaks directly to Rassie's unrivalled ability to think beyond the here and now.

Jacques and Rassie have worked together for such a long time that when they took over the Springboks, it was seamless. They went from the Cheetahs to the Stormers, then Munster and the Boks, so they clearly enjoyed each other's implicit trust. That mutual trust was then extended to the coaching team and the players through a culture of honesty, openness and clear selection criteria.

Rassie and Jacques needed their players to achieve certain metrics which were communicated openly to the entire group, from telling them how many contacts they had per minute to how many times they got back on their feet to work back into positions where they could contribute to the whole side. Whether players were then picked or omitted, clear reasons were provided.

That honesty and openness was something I tried to implement as well, but in asking myself where they got things right that I didn't, I think about their ability to reset. You have to continually reset your goals, and you must do it with the team. You can't just do it by yourself or with your closest coaching colleagues. You need to get players to understand that there is a new challenge in front of them.

When I look back at the years of Rassie and Jacques, I see an ability to reset goals continually. After winning the 2019 World Cup, they reset the goal to the British & Irish Lions series in 2021, despite losing a year of rugby to Covid-19. There was such a clear, shared vision to win that series and the Boks had to go with the side that won the World Cup. They ticked that box together, then set new goals for the 2023 World Cup that saw them become far harder on the players.

Suddenly, guys like Handré Pollard - who had missed out on being fit by one week - were left out of the 2023 Rugby World Cup squad. Yes, he would come back in and be a key player for the Boks in France, but to omit a player who had done so much in 2019 and 2021 was not only unbelievably brave but showed the coaching team were prepared to stick to the principles they had communicated to the players.

Rassie and Jacques' ability to reset the goals, and for the new objectives to be accepted by the players, was crucial to their success.

In looking back, I think my big mistake after winning the Tri-Nations in 1998 was failing to turn my attention immediately to how we were going to win the 1999 World Cup. Perhaps, in the games leading into the tournament, I should have mixed and matched to find my best combinations. It was a different time, of course, and back then, if you were not picked to play in a Springbok side it simply meant you had been dropped. But, in hindsight, I believe the ability to reset and build towards the next goal is something I could have benefited from. And it is certainly something that made the tenure of Rassie and Jacques the greatest Bok rugby has seen.

The ability of Rassie, Jacques and the rest of the Springbok coaching team to find that extra one per cent is unrivalled in the modern global game. Winning each of their 2023 World Cup playoff matches - quarterfinal, semifinal and final - by a single point was no coincidence.

Think of Cheslin Kolbe's miraculous charge-down against France in the quarterfinal and how, in the same game, Eben Etzebeth's intervention - deemed to have gone backwards instead of forwards - stopped the French from scoring a certain try. Key moments like those aren't happenstance; they occur because South African players work that tiny bit harder to give their teammates an extra chance of winning.

We saw it again in the semifinal against England when Ox Nche came off the bench with the Boks pretty much dead and buried and delivered a scrum performance that almost single-handedly put his side back in the match. A guy like Nche would have been watching for years as the Tendai Mtawariras, Steven Kitshoffs and Trevor Nyakanes of the setup got it done week in and week out, and because of the alignment Rassie and Jacques had embedded in the system, Ox knew exactly what he needed to do. That doesn't happen by chance; it happens because of meticulous preparation and an ability to preempt and plan.

Then, in the final, you had Pieter-Steph du Toit making 28 tackles. Who does that? Who on earth gets you 28 tackles in any game of rugby, let alone a Rugby World Cup final? It was a freakish performance. And there was Pollard's 100 per cent goalkicking record throughout the knockouts, having initially been left out of the squad due to injury.

It's the one-per-cents that get you through. Think about Jordie Barrett's penalty miss in the final with the game on the line. What would Pollard have done with the same kick in the same situation?

No stone was left unturned for Rassie and Jacques, in 2019 in Japan and 2023 in France....