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Former Springboks assistant coach Gary Gold has heralded the extraordinary depth of talent Rassie Erasmus has built since they won the last Rugby World Cup.
Writing in an article about his websiteGold has a lot to admire about how Erasmus has bled players over time to the point that they are now at least five deep at every position at least one.
While Gold believes there are nine locks who could do an equally good job, for example, his only concern is at halfway, where there is a three-way battle for the No.10 jersey between Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, two-time World Cup winner Handre Pollard and Mania Libbok.
“The thing South Africa done in the last two and a half years, what is not talked about enough is the depth of construction. It’s not the depth that every coach claims to have, where you can lose one player per position and survive. Real depth. The type where you look at the locks currently available to the Springboks and count the nine men you’d be comfortable dropping into a trial match, and you look at the props and find pretty much the same,” he wrote.
“I can’t think of a team in the last ten or fifteen years that could say that All black people between 2011 and 2015, who were as good as any side of that era, they had very good depth, one or two players down in most positions. Not five.
“And if I’m honest about where the Springboks are thin, it’s one jersey. The fly-half. I’d say there are three players the Bok board would put in a world-class ten, and one of them, Pollard, has just come back from injury. Everywhere else the resources are outstanding.”
Erasmus rolled the dice again this weekend, making 13 changes to his starting XV for the solo Test against Australia in Perth. And Gold says it’s an opportunity for the players entrusted with the responsibility of replacing Siya Kolisi, Malcolm Marx and Pieter-Steph du Toit to add their names to the selection mix in the future.
Gold added: “This is not a coach who rests his best players and hopes to get away with it. This is a coach who knows he has players who have been in and around the team for two seasons, who have trained every week against the best team in the world and who now need to be tested against real opposition, away from home, with the onus on them, not To and Marx.”
“If they get there, and I think a good number of them will, the Springboks’ options a year after the World Cup become even deeper and richer. If they don’t, Rassie has learned something he should have known in September 2026, not September 2027. Either way, information is worth more than results, and I suspect he knows that better than anyone.”
Gold has recent first-hand experience of facing Australia as defense coach of Japan, who the Wallabies faced in back-to-back Tests in August, and is not expecting too many surprises from Les Kiss.
“I’ve watched this Wallaby side more closely than most. Les Kiss’s first two Tests were against Japan,” he said.
“Here’s what they do, in one line: they win a penalty in the middle of the field, kick it into the corner and score. Twenty-seven lines in the opponent’s competition 22 this year. Twenty-four ended with a try or a penalty. In seven tests, they kicked one goal. They don’t want three points. They don’t want a corner.
“Whoever gets the umpire’s right at the breakdown takes a corner all afternoon. Whoever gets it wrong defends their line. And if Australia are in the game for 65 minutes, will they finally take the three points against the best maul defense in the world, or do they once again trust the corner?”
“That one decision could be the whole game.”
