Doc Rassie prescribing bitter pills for World Rugby as entertaining Springboks go box office

The suits at World Rugby no doubt watch Springbok games with one hand over an eye as they ask themselves, “What is Dr Erasmus going to prescribe to his players this time?”

Often, Rassie’s dose is bitter pills for World Rugby, the rigid runners of the game. Boring old farts (former England captain Will Carling’s words, not mine) who cannot shrug their suspicion of anything outside the tried and tested tramlines of the game.

The rabbits Rassie pulled out of the hat against Italy in Gqeberha are well-documented, and immediately, there was praise and uproar in equal measure around the rugby globe. Some hailed maverick Rassie for continuing to blaze new trails in the sport, while others branded the Boks cheats and disrespectful. Most of the negative reaction was typically from the Northern Hemisphere, where a stereotype of the Springboks has lingered for over a century.

It seems they will forever be Neanderthal brutes who bludgeon the opposition, and if that one-dimensional approach doesn’t work, there is no Plan B. To be fair, this old trope was not without merit in the amateur days when the South Africans were bigger than everyone else, but in the professional era, gym programmes have cancelled the size factor out to a significant degree.

The Springboks still have naturally big men, but they have had to move beyond “route one” to stay ahead of the pack, and the likes of Cheslin Kolbe and Kurt-Lee Arendse hardly fit the “Bok bulldozer” cliché.

Still, many in the rugby world struggle to embrace the fact that the Springboks under Rassie Erasmus have morphed into a versatile outfit that can switch between the pressure game that was all they knew in Rassie’s first year in charge and exploring the width of the field with exhilarating backline play.

Two of their flyhalves, Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu and Manie Libbock, are —along with Scotland’s Finn Russell — the most enterprising playmakers in the game.

In 2018 and 2019, the Boks indeed laboured under the tiresome tyranny of the box kick, but the coach had to start somewhere after inheriting a shambles from outgoing coach Allister Coetzee. Of course, that basic game plan won the Boks a surprise World Cup title in 2019 and — to give them due praise — they were already flexing their expansive muscle when you consider the quality of the tries scored by wingers Kolbe and Makazole Mapimpi in the final against England.

Last October, Erasmus took the Springboks to the Channel Island of Jersey for a camp ahead of their November tour. A host of leading British and Irish journalists were invited to join the Boks for interviews. Rassie wanted to change the rugby world’s perception of the Springboks, but the Charm Offensive bore little fruit.

Stigmas are hard to shake off. It did not help the Springbok image when the 2021 British and Irish Lions tour was shrouded in controversy, with Erasmus in the middle of some of it. I’m talking about the 62-minute video assassination of referee Nick Berry’s performance in the first Test, which culminated in a lengthy ban for the coach.

Erasmus, though, does what he does for the best of the team and the video, leaked somewhere between the Bok management and the World Rugby referees’ department, had the impact of resolving most of the Boks’ issues with the officiating. The second Test was won largely as a consequence.

A more current example is the controversial start to the second Test against Italy, where the Boks manipulated a scrum from the kick-off.

When the Boks were criticised, Erasmus tweeted a video clip of how the Italians cheated in the set scrums both in Pretoria and Gqeberha. The clip shows the scrumhalf putting the ball around the legs of the openside flank and flicking it straight to the No 8. The ball doesn’t even get to the prop, never mind the hooker.

The irony of the criticism of Erasmus is that the Boks, for decades, were derided for their dinosaur tactics. The Wallabies and All Blacks did not disguise their pleasure in outwitting the South Africans in the first two decades of the millennium, but now that the Boks have gone to the other extreme, the tune should have changed. Sadly, it hasn’t, despite two recent World Cups in the bag, and counting.

Maybe that is the problem. Scorn has given way to jealousy, and the Springboks are not getting the respect they deserve in some quarters.

A big point that the Springbok detractors are missing is that, ultimately, sport is about entertainment, and in that regard, the Boks are box office.