What tough choices await Rassie Erasmus, Springboks before the 2027 Rugby World Cup?

Springboks coach Rassie Erasmus knows he is heading towards a point in the journey to the 2027 Rugby World Cup where he will have to make some big calls as far as some of his senior stars are concerned.

It’s been clear since the end of the triumphant 2023 Rugby World Cup in France that some of the players who won back-to-back Webb-Ellis trophies with Erasmus may not make it to Australia in two years’ time. Some of the stalwarts of the South African game are close to the rugby twilight.

Over the last 18 months Erasmus has had bloated Bok squads and has handed almost 20 players their debuts during that time. This year, for the home Tests against Italy and Georgia, the Boks operated with a squad of almost 50 players, with different players getting a taste of Test rugby.

There has also been heavy rotation, with many of the senior players hardly playing full games. All of this is designed to manage workloads, but also expose more rookies to build capacity when those big decisions need to be made.

Erasmus says he is enjoying the talk and speculation around his squad’s age ahead of the 2025 rugby showpiece event. It tells him people are still interested in the Boks winning doing an unprecedented “three-peat”.

However, he admits that he isn’t “100 percent sure” how they are actually going to decide who makes the trip and who won’t be traveling Down Under in two years’ time.

“It hasn’t actually happened before in South African rugby that people and the media talk about the squad’s age ahead of a World Cup. And that’s something that is good, because it shows that people are interested,” Erasmus told the media this week during their Rugby Championship camp.

“But for us, it's about performance, trying to calculate which guys will be there in 2027. That's why we had a camp of 45.

“Of course, we're not 100 percent sure yet. Some guys, we feel iffy. Some guys can definitely make it. Other guys are just freaks who can play like Johnny Sexton until they're 38, but you don't get a lot of those.

“(For the youngsters), it's about making sure that you get some Test caps into guys, some experience of them understanding our coaching staff, understanding how our environment works, getting into hopefully most of the guys 10 plus Test caps before we go to that Rugby World Cup.

At the start of the season, when the Boks got together for the first time, they went through vigorous fitness testing, which players such as Cheslin Kolbe described as the toughest thing they have ever experienced in a Bok camp.

Erasmus explained that this was designed to check where the players are at in terms of their fitness and performance levels. But it’s clever that it’s also a marker about where they need to be physically to continue playing for the Boks when competing with the youngsters.

Erasmus, however, knows this core group of senior players inside out and will always give them the best chance to prove themselves worthy of another World Cup hunt.

“Obviously we just don't want to filter an experienced player out just because he's not going to play in 2027,” Erasmus said.

“You know, it will be very unfair on a senior player or older player, or more experienced player, because his Test match career can last until November 2026 and then he's done. Players don’t plan their rugby lives around World Cups. They plan their rugby lives around their age and how well they can play.

“So if they are still the top one to three in their positions up until 2026, we'll probably play those guys.

“We are making plans like we have now, having bigger groups and making sure the younger guys coming through are quite comfortable and up to speed and confident playing the Springbok jersey. So I think we're okay.”