South Africa has the deepest talent pool in world rugby right now. Rassie Erasmus can swap out nearly his entire starting XV and the team barely misses a beat. That kind of depth is almost unheard of in the modern game. But according to the Springboks head coach, it could have been even scarier.
Erasmus admitted this week that a whole generation of South African players essentially got lost during the pandemic. And it’s something he thinks about a lot.
“Since we started the elite player development pathway back in 2013, we started getting the rewards in 2019 and 2020. Then we got COVID,” he said. “I think we missed a lot of players in that COVID era. Guys who didn’t play Craven Week, SA Schools, didn’t go to the SA academy, didn’t play Junior Springboks.”
That disruption created what Erasmus calls a clear gap in the current squad. Look at the age range between 22 and 26. That’s where the missing players should be. Instead, a lot of those guys stopped playing entirely. They never got contracts. They just faded out.
How the Boks manage the missing years
Erasmus and his staff have had to get creative. They work tightly with SA Rugby’s high performance general manager Dave Wessels and Junior Springboks head coach Kevin Foote. Together they map out the depth chart and identify prospects early. Then they bring them into the senior setup fast, just to see if the guy can handle it.
“Does he feel comfortable with what we’re doing? Does he understand what we’re saying?” Erasmus said. “Dave is great at that and Kevin is great at that.”
The gap is most noticeable in the front five, but the Boks are still stacked there. Erasmus rattled off names like Jan-Hendrik Wessels, Ox Nche, Johan Grobbelaar, Malcolm Marx, Carlu Sadie, Zach Porthen, Wilco Louw, Neethling Fouche and Vincent Koch. At lock, where people thought depth was thin after a bunch of injuries, he pointed to Riley Norton as a guy who has stepped up.
Eben Etzebeth is almost back
Speaking of the second row, Eben Etzebeth is close to returning. He’s been sidelined with an injury after finishing a 12-match suspension. Erasmus said the team is doing final fitness and strength work with him to get him ready for England.
“Lood de Jager might be ready then, but a guy like Riley has really put up his hand,” Erasmus said.
He also mentioned Paul de Villiers, who apparently crushed the team’s fitness test. Topped everybody. And he’d played the previous weekend, so it wasn’t like he was fresh. Erasmus laughed that it probably shouldn’t be the headline but figured it would be anyway.
The bottom line is that SA Rugby built a system that keeps producing players even when the pipeline gets punched in the face by a global crisis. That’s not luck. That’s structure. And right now, the rest of the world is trying to figure out how to replicate it.
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