There is merit in selecting a backline player of the year as well as a forward of the year when it comes to identifying World Rugby’s Player of the Year. After all, how do you differentiate between the power of Pieter-Steph du Toit and the guile and poise of Cheslin Kolbe?
Loose forward Du Toit, a World Rugby Player of the Year winner, and Springboks lock Eben Etzebeth, are World Rugby Player of the Year nominees along with winger Kolbe.
Trying to choose one over the other is like trying to make a case for Richie McCaw over Dan Carter or vice versa, the two iconic All Blacks who were the drivers for the most successful All Blacks team in history.
McCaw won the award three times and Carter won it twice. Carter is the world record holder for points scored and McCaw lost just 15 of his 148 Tests.
Who was more integral to the All Blacks’ success? Neither because they dovetailed in contribution.
This is a golden age for Springboks rugby. It is the most gifted generation of South African players in the professional era and it is a credit to the collective of these Boks that three players get nominated out of four.
Points scorers tend to get the nod, as do try-scorers. Then there are those prominent loose-forwards like Schalk Burger and McCaw.
Only one of Etzebeth, Du Toit or Kolbe will be named the winner. There is a fourth nominee, the Ireland captain Caelan Doris. I just don’t see how he could even be a consideration, given the Boks’ dominance and pedigree since winning the World Cup.
Plenty of polls have been conducted in the week since the nominations were made public. Kolbe takes all of them. Du Toit is second and Etzebeth, the most capped Test player in Springboks history and the South African Player of the Year, comes in third.
It says everything about the quality of performance from Du Toit and Kolbe that the majority voting on polls could relegate the imperious form of Etzebeth to third.
This is a golden age for Springbok rugby. It is the most gifted generation of South African players in the professional era and it is a credit to the collective of these Boks that three players get nominated out of four.
The Boks, this weekend in Cardiff, complete their 13th international of the season. It is their last one and, given that Wales have lost their last 11 internationals, it will be a comfortable win for the world champion and rugby championship title-holding Boks.
They will end the year with 11 wins from 13 and with an international dominance of 23 wins from their last 27 Test matches.
The group of players is unrivalled in achievement in professional Springboks rugby, but so is the effort of the head coach Rassie Erasmus, who doubled up as head coach and national director of rugby in 2018 and 2019, promoted Jacques Nienaber to head coach between 2020 and 2023 while continuing as national director of rugby and is now exclusively the head coach of the Springboks.
Nienaber, in 2018 and 2019, was Erasmus’s assistant coach with an emphasis on defence.
The duo have shaped the success of the Springboks and the evolution of these players from Test players to the best in the business.
Consider this: in Erasmus and Nienaber’s first year in charge, the Boks won seven from 14. They started the international year with a 22-20 defeat to Wales in Washington DC and finished it with a 20-11 defeat in Cardiff.
That was the performance curve of the players Erasmus and Nienaber inherited. Did they get rid of the players en-masse? No, they coached them, nurtured them, continued to select them and ultimately won back to back World Cups, a British & Irish Lions series and two Rugby Championship titles with the same players who stuttered to defeat in Cardiff against Wales in 2011.
As the world continues to be awed by the potency of the world champion Boks, a reminder of the journey is as powerful as the Boks scrum. There were 19 future World Cup winners in the match 23 that lost to Wales in Cardiff in 2018.
And 15 of them will play in Cardiff on Saturday.
Erasmus and Nienaber are the finest examples of the value of a coach in rugby. They transformed underperforming Test players into world champions.
If the debate is big on who is the world player of the year, then there can be no debate that Erasmus is the best coach of the year, with an argument to be made the best coach ever.
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