VIDEO: The aspects of the Bok game that improved since 2019
Jacques Nienaber stood his ground in the face of questions about South Africa’s build-up to the defence of their World Cup crown and the constant team changes ahead of the global showpiece in France next month.
Throughout the Rugby Championship and the warm-up match against Argentina in Buenos Aires earlier this month, Nienaber made nine or more changes to the starting XV.
With other teams preferring to build continuity – the All Blacks focussed on winning the Rugby Championship by constantly playing their ‘A-Team’ – Nienaber was repeatedly questioned about the wisdom of the Springboks’ approach.
However, the Bok coach felt they are in a better position now than during the build-up to the World Cup four years ago.
He again highlighted the importance of getting enough game time into the entire squad ahead of the World Cup, by constantly rotating the team selection.
It is an approach that has been questioned repeatedly, but Nienaber believes it is a change from the 2019 approach that may well work in their favour.
“We always said, to defend our title [in France] will require a squad effort,” Nienaber said in the build-up to the encounter with Wales in Cardiff on Saturday.
“You want players that are in form, that have been exposed to Test matches and are battle-hardened – as we will have when we play Wales this [coming] weekend.
“We want to be in form when we meet Scotland [in Marseille on September 10] in our first World Cup game.
“We know we are playing in a tough pool [which includes world No.1 Ireland and a high-flying Scotland] and we have a tough route [to the play-offs].
“We will have to play knock-out rugby from the first game [against Scotland, on September 10].”
The Bok coach suggested they are in a better position than before the 2019 tournament – when they had less than 18 months to get all the systems in place.
(WATCH as Springbok coach Jacques Nienaber explains which aspects of the team’s game and approach improved since they won the World Cup in 2019…)
“I definitely think we have more depth than 2019,” was the deliberate answer of a philosophical Nienaber.
“We only started [with the preparations] in 2018,” he said of their build-up to winning the Webb Ellis Cup in Yokohama, Japan.
“[While] we wanted to build depth, we also wanted to get Test caps into players and give players exposure to our style of coaching and the environment.
“We didn’t have the luxury that we had the last couple of years, where we could rotate the squad frequently.”
He added that the constant changing – up to 11 changes at a time during the Rugby Championship and the first two warm-up matches – will be decreased significantly going forward.
“The reason was that we wanted to create as much squad depth as possible,” Nienaber told a media briefing from the team’s base in Cardiff.
“We had the luxury and sometimes, when you take that risk, performance can suffer and you put the squad under pressure.
“However, we felt it was good pressure.
“We have better squad depth than we had in 2019.”
Nienaber said the obvious ‘mission’ is to go back-to-back in the World Cup and the experience of 2019 will also come in handy.
“We have a little bit of an ‘older’ squad,” he said, adding: “Two-thirds of the team was part of the [victorious] 2019 World Cup campaign.
“With an older squad, you lose a bit of agility and speed, but you get calm heads, experience and good leaders.
“There are things that you gain [with a more mature squad] and things that you lose.
“For us, to get back-up players that have been exposed to Test matches and produce good performances was the route we decided to go after 2019.”
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* Picture credit: @Springboks
