Are Wallabies punch drunk or battle-ready? Boks about to find out, says Rassie

There was a time when Rassie Erasmus took orders from Joe Schmidt, and the Springbok coach admits he is nervous going up against his old master when the Springboks host the Wallabies on Saturday at Ellis Park.

Schmidt is the man respected for building the Ireland rugby dynasty, and Erasmus says he learned from him when he and Jacques Nienaber were coaching Munster in 2016 and 2017.

“I’m not one to suck up other coaches because it doesn’t help your team perform better on match day, but Joe is a great coach,” Erasmus said, after naming his team for the opening Test of the Rugby Championship.

Schmidt has picked the Wallabies up off the scrapheap — they could not get out of their pool at the last World Cup — and shaped them into a side that almost beat the British and Irish Lions.

“I worked with Joe in Ireland, as did (assistant Bok coaches) Felix Jones and Jerry Flannery,” Erasmus said.

“When you sign with an Irish club, you don’t sign with Ulster, Munster or Leinster, you sign with the Irish Rugby Union, so we reported to Joe Schmidt,” Erasmus explained.

“That is what I did for two years. We sat in many meetings together. He is a very particular guy, very detail-driven. He certainly knows what he wants.

“Players are on edge to satisfy his demands. That is what we will get from the Wallabies this weekend,” Erasmus added.

“I know he is stepping down and Les Kiss is with him here. But he is a very competitive guy and I can’t see them not being on a high after the way they finished that Lions series.

“He will want to finish on a high and the players have a lot of respect for what he has brought to the Aussie jersey. Everybody is talking about the fight for the jersey is back. That is what Joe does.

“You can’t forget what that guy did for Ireland with only 160 professional players. I had first-hand experience of that. So we have respect for him, and also for the squad he is building.”

While the Aussies were scrapping for their lives in a hugely hyped series with the Lions, the Boks took a road less travelled and had relatively unexacting encounters with the Barbarians, Italy (twice), and Georgia.

“There are two ways to look at the debate over battle-readiness,” Erasmus said. “They have six or seven injuries after having to field the same team over and over.

“But we lost only one player in Jasper Wiese, when he lost his temper a bit. Otherwise, we have lost nobody here, which bodes well for the Rugby Championship.

“Yes, games are games because you get the pressure and the nerves, and we might be lacking a bit there because none of our games were close. Tactically, we were not challenged by Italy and Georgia, but those were very physical matches.

“Are the Wallabies punch drunk or battle ready? You can never be sure. You can only hope you did the right thing.

“There are two realities,” Erasmus concluded.

“What they believe in their team, what we believe in our team, and then there is the truth. We will find out the truth on Saturday.”

While Italy never extended the Boks on the scoreboard, Erasmus acknowledged that the Boks learned some lessons, especially from the second-half fade at Loftus Versfeld in the first Test.

“The guys were going to have ten days off but we cancelled that,” the coach said. “This is our third week in camp, and we have been together for nine weeks.

“In that game in Pretoria, we lost our intensity for a few minutes and they hit back with a couple of tries. Our expectations of ourselves are very high and we were disappointed with that.

“We tried to rectify it in the second Italy Test and against Georgia, and upped the intensity in training, plus added an extra week of training.

“If we hit patches where we relax in the Rugby Championship, then we coaches are missing a trick.”