EDITORIAL | Take a bow Rassie — the team you built leaves a legacy beyond trophies

Of course, almost every South African would love the Springboks to defend their trophy at the 2023 Rugby World Cup that kicks off on Friday. 

And of course, that’s easier said than done. Retaining a title is far more difficult than conquering one. It is by no means definite the Boks will lift the Webb Ellis Cup in Paris on October 28. Nowhere is it written that it’s their God-given right they will even be in the final. 

Like in Japan four years ago, they will have to fight for each blade of French grass gained like World War 1 trench liberators. 

The signs are certainly not bad too. Coach Jacques Nienaber and director of rugby Rassie Erasmus have methodically and scientifically added to the core of the 2019 winning team. The Boks have huge experience and superb emerging starlets like Canan Moodie. 

It will be tough. And if they cannot do it, South Africans will have to be prepared to relinquish the pleasurable sensation that comes with having a team called “world champions”. 

Even if that happens — and no-one is saying it will, because these Boks are determined and fired up and may well become only the second team to retain the World Cup — but if it does, there is much to savour in this Springbok team built by Erasmus as coach for the last tournament, and in partnership with Nienaber for this one. 

It might well be the team to leave a legacy like no Springbok team before it. Erasmus in his two roles, might have left a legacy like few coaches or rugby boffins before him. 

Erasmus’s breath of fresh air — and anyone who has watched his tears stream in television interviews on the topic, cannot doubt the sincerity of his intentions, or the man — created a winning formula, and team.

Finally, a Springbok coach understood that embracing transformation as a weapon simply made sense in terms of finding the strongest combination, and in doing so, the side harnessed the love and support of all South Africans, making for a force that became hard to stop on the global stage. 

Perhaps South Africans are jaded by terms such as nation-building. But Springbok teams’ successes over the years and especially in the World Cups in 1995, 2007 and 2019 have impacted the country’s psyche and how its people react to one other. 

Never in the sweeping manner Clint Eastwood and Matt Damon portrayed in the disappointingly superficial Invictus. But at some level, more grittily, even as societal pressures and pure relics of racism push us apart, sport remains a glue against that, and rugby at the forefront of it. 

And never has a team been as inclusive — selected on merit — and as representative as the world champions of Japan 2019 and pretenders of France 2023. 

Erasmus has made strides reversing the structural conservativeness of rugby, installing talented, hard-working, boffin black coaches at many levels. 

So many previous Springbok coaches — and many at provincial and lower levels — viewed transformation as a noose around the neck, and so it became one. Too many talented black players were overlooked because of prejudice or came into the team feeling unwanted, labelled ridiculous terms like “quota players”. 

Erasmus’s breath of fresh air — and anyone who has watched his tears stream in television interviews on the topic, cannot doubt the sincerity of his intentions, or the man — created a winning formula, and team. That also created a side all South Africans could identify with, more than any Bok combination before it. It gave South Africa a first black Springbok captain, national hero and global icon in Siya Kolisi, who, like his teammates of all races, has been a supreme ambassador to the country and a source of inspiration in tough times for its people. 

Erasmus, the self-acknowledged renegade, does not always get enough national credit for that role. Many South Africans also simply adore him for it. 

Take a bow Rassie. Take an even greater one if the trophy gets lifted again in seven weeks’ time. We’ll just stick our necks out right now and say we believe it will be a certain Mr Kolisi from iBhayi in the Eastern Cape, whose green-clad arms will do that lifting. Go Bokke.