Erasmus ‘has what it takes’
New Springbok coach Rassie Erasmus has what it takes to bring the winning mentality back to the camp, former World Cup winner John Smit says. Speaking at an event at Grey High School’s Pavilion yesterday, Smit said they would have to wait and see when the team played their first match against Wales in the US in June. “We hope so. We won’t know until he starts playing. He has a good coaching track record, so we just have to wait and see,” he said. “The new coach, we all know, is incredibly intelligent at the game, understands strategy, and he’s had good results as a coach. “I do think we going to need to bring a huge amount of intellect into how we play the game, how we address our position and how we negate and analyse the teams we play against.” He said the best way to determine his chances of success were to “try to see how many of your first XV will make the world XV”. “And when the answer is probably not one, that is where strategy and planning comes in, to create an environment that builds a little confidence, gets his players to become better than they are and elevate some of them into world XV status,” Smit said.
With the Boks playing Wales in Washington only a week before their first test against Eddie Jones’s England at Ellis Park on June 9, Smit said the English would provide a stern test for the Erasmus outfit. “It’s not all doom and gloom. We have seen England, and there is some frailty – what we really need is for Ireland to beat England at home, just to add a few more wobbles to Eddie Jones’s camp. “I’d like to believe we are going to see some positivity around the Springbok team. We need it desperately for the game in general,” he said. He said younger rugby players needed role models whom they could look up to and hoped the current crop of players would provide the necessary motivation to encourage younger players to be part of the game. About the tenure of former Springbok coach Allister Coetzee, who was also part of the coaching staff of the 2007 World Cup winning team, Smit said there had been improvement in the second year of Coetzee’s tenure. “I am very close to Allister. He helped us win a world cup, so I know and have worked under him. He is a good coach, and the fact that it never worked out was disappointing,” he said. Looking ahead to the England tests and the 2019 World Cup, Smit said Erasmus was very good strategically and would need to pick players based on the type of game they wanted to play. “What we have to try to do is to pick a particular way we want to play, and choose a squad who believe in that way, understand the opposition so that how we plan our attack is derived by what is in front of us,” Smit said.
