MARK KEOHANE | I say keep our World Cup warriors, young and old

The majority of Siya Kolisi’s double World Cup winning squad will challenge for an unprecedented hat-trick of titles in Australia in 2027.

I was asked if the Boks could win the World Cup in 2027 and I said only if they didn’t have to play Australia in Brisbane in a play-off game. It was said half as a joke and half as a cruel truth.

Quite remarkably, even this great group of Springboks have not managed to win in Brisbane, losing twice at the SunCorp Stadium to the Wallabies and losing another Test to Australia on Queensland’s Gold Coast.

Ireland is the only other team the Boks have not beaten, but Kolisi’s world champions finally get to play Ireland at home next year in a three-Test series. The showdown is a promoter’s dream with the world’s No 1 hosting No 2.

This is an exceptional group of players, led by the most extraordinary coaching duo, who triumphed in their identification of support coaching staff and players

Ireland, in the past six years, had played the Boks in Dublin in 2022, winning 19-16, and in a pool match at the World Cup in Paris, winning 13-8.

Understandably, after a World Cup cycle the spotlight shines on the next generation and many are quick to want to shift older members of a completed cycle to one side.

Don’t.

What these Boks and their tactical mastermind and primary selector Rassie Erasmus have shown is that age is just a number and that experience can’t be bought or fast tracked.

Good enough is young enough; just like good enough is old enough.

There is a place for an 18-year-old and a 38-year-old. Erasmus’s Boks are testimony to this, especially when it comes to the oldies. Erasmus has never shied from picking teenage talent, an example being winger Canan Moodie, as well as older players such as 38-year-old Schalk Brits (2019) and 37-year-old Deon Fourie (2023). All were inspired choices.

Brits, a hooker, captained the Boks as a No 8 in a pool match in 2019 and Fourie, a loose-forward, captained the Boks in the final minutes of the World Cup final, playing at hooker.

If age is not a consideration for Erasmus, who remains in charge as South Africa’s national director of rugby, then the number on a player’s back is also irrelevant.

Loose-forwards Kwagga Smith and Pieter-Steph du Toit have ended matches on the wing, scrumhalf Grant Williams started matches on the right wing, and Erasmus and departing Bok coach Jacques Nienaber picked seven forwards and a specialist fullback in Willie le Roux as their substitute’s bench for the final.

The duo was comfortable to play a World Cup final against the All Blacks with one specialist hooker in Bongi Mbonambi and one specialist scrumhalf, Faf de Klerk. The latter played the entire match and the former lasted just three minutes. Somehow the Boks got through it all victorious.

This is an exceptional group of players, led by the most extraordinary coaching duo, who triumphed in their identification of support coaching staff and players. 

Erasmus, when criticised on selections, never had an issue to agree with a critic that perhaps he hadn’t picked what many thought was the best player in a position, but what he was insistent about was that he had picked what he and Nienaber believed was the right player for this squad.

It is these same players who will lead the challenge against Ireland in South Africa in 2024 and the core of them will be around in 2027, whether starting, finishing or being entrusted in match-day analysis if not selected in the 23.

Erasmus has never shirked from making the biggest calls on selection or in substituting the biggest names in a match if it was necessary to introduce fresher legs. He got his substitutions right against France, England and New Zealand, just like he did his squad selections.

Expect more of the same in the next four years from the same players and mastermind.

Don’t be in a hurry to retire the older warriors. Rather be in a hurry to applaud what they have achieved since coming together in 2018.