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Rassie and Boks go on charm offensive with British media as England Test looms

Springboks coach Rassie Erasmus is seen during a Rugby Championship match between the Australian Wallabies and the South African Springboks at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane, Australia, 10 August 2024. EPA-EFE/DARREN ENGLAND NO ARCHIVING, EDITORIAL USE ONLY AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND OUT

By Craig Ray

31 Oct 2024

The Springboks are on a charm offensive as they start their first northern hemisphere tour since winning the Rugby World Cup 2023.

Despite the location on the island of Jersey, a pack of mostly England-based journalists has been welcomed to the Boks’ training base, before the team’s Tests against Scotland, England and Wales.

They have been treated to a range of interviews and one-on-ones – in stark contrast to usual tightly controlled media access when the Boks are home.

It’s great copy and content of course, and coach Rassie Erasmus is the main attraction as you would expect. So, while exclusive interviews with the Bok coach are almost non-existent in his home country, Erasmus spent a relaxed 30 minutes waxing lyrical with the BBC’s Rugby Weekly Podcast, covering a wide range of topics relating to the Boks.

The Boks are aiming to win the Rugby World Cup in 2027 for an unprecedented ‘three-peat’ (three in a row). Objectively, no sport wants the same winner of its showpiece event for too long.

With that in mind, the Boks know that besides being the side with a big target on their backs as a matter of course, there is extra resentment towards them because of their World Cup successes.

And in the English-speaking world, which covers almost all of rugby’s biggest markets, the British press are the most powerful. Getting them onside, or at least to a position where they’re more measured in their reporting about the Boks, is part of a broader plan.

Erasmus is in many ways the man who can change perceptions, but simultaneously he is the person who provokes the strongest feelings of resentment. Especially in Britain.

He is grudgingly admired for the way he has moulded the Boks into one of the best rugby teams of any era. But to many non-South Africans he remains something of an enigma – a perceived bully and bad loser using social media to attack officials.

On the podcast with the respected journalist Chris Jones and former England wing Chris Ashton, Erasmus confronted the issue of his use of social media to make a point.

He touched on his infamous 62-minute video, which brutally dissected Australian referee Nic Berry’s less-than-stellar performance in the first Test against the 2021 British and Irish Lions. The video made its way into the public domain and Erasmus was banned for 10 months.

Almost immediately after his ban ended, Erasmus was again slapped with a two-match suspension for seemingly taking a swipe at English referee Wayne Barnes on X following a Test against France in November 2022.

On the podcast, he again emphasised that he never leaked the Berry video, and that his 2022 Tweets were never directly aimed at Barnes.

“If you go and read those tweets, there’s actually no criticism,” Erasmus said on the podcast. “I was actually talking to the South African fans.

“I was actually saying we have to change our game and adapt to what is easier for the referee to see. And if you look at our game now there are similarities.”

It is the same version Erasmus has stood by since the incident, but at RWC 2023 he admitted that the Boks (himself) needed to show the referees more respect.

“For us [the Boks] the first word is ‘respect’,” Erasmus said before the quarterfinal against France.

“I think definitely we got it wrong at stages, especially when we had the year off [due to Covid] in 2020, and then we went into the Lions series … the level of communication was really tough. I guess on both sides it led to frustration.”

Transformation

Springboks, Boks Wing Cheslin Kolbe has become a star in the Rassie Erasmus era. (Photo: Dirk Kotze / Gallo Images)

Springboks, Boks Scrumhalf Grant Williams and flank Kwagga Smith (on the ground) are part of the Bok squad on tour in the United Kingdom. (Photo: Dirk Kotze / Gallo Images)

Rassie Erasmus, Springboks, Boks Rassie Erasmus has been involved in two Rugby World Cup-winning campaigns with the Boks. (Photo: Darren England / EPA-EFE)

While much of the podcast covered ground the coach has trodden before, an Erasmus discussion is always revealing, engaging and entertaining.

One topic, which is not an issue in the Springbok setup these days, was transformation. With an English audience in mind, Erasmus reminded listeners that not long ago, “transformation” had been a contentious word in rugby.

Responding to a question about what makes him want to continue as Bok coach, Erasmus spoke on a wide-range of threads when explaining his motivations.

He reiterated what he’s stated before – that it’s about bringing joy and hope to South Africa and South Africa and about seeing all cultures working and celebrating together, that drives him.

“It is the working together of South Africans. It doesn’t matter what you are – if you are Christian, Muslim, Black, English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu,” he said.

“If you use the best of everybody, that’s what gives me a kick. It gives me a kick when people see what can be done. And the players are understanding that.”

Which was a good segue into the issue of transformation. Erasmus addressed the subject differently – not as a minimum target of black players, but almost as a mantra to change everything.

And we have seen it, not only in the racial make-up of the team, but in the innovation and courage to think differently. The Boks have transformed thinking around replacements, and the idea of the bench, tactics, training, team-naming and many more concepts.

They have given the reserve players an identity – the bomb squad – and made them as important, if not more important than the starting team. They have taken a policy designed for player safety reasons and turned it into an innovative rugby weapon of mass destruction.

They have transformed their relationship with the country and with each other.

“The word ‘transformation’ became such a bad word in South Africa,” Erasmus said. “For many people it meant ‘black in, white out.’ But not for me.

“To me, and the players, it meant ‘change’. Like we’re doing here (with the British media), we’ve opened up to let the media understand us a bit better.

“They can see that we are not just a bunch of bullies. Sometimes players are tagged for something the head coach might have said, or what one player mentioned in a podcast, but there are much deeper things in this team.

“There are some seriously intelligent guys with business brains; there are farmers and some guys who had tremendous struggles. They never get to know and understand the English media; it’s always about the ‘revenge game’.

“This week we decided to let them get closer to the team to understand us, and see that we’re not all about ‘fight’ and ‘hate’ and those kinds of words.” DM

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