Eben Etzebeth

Eben Etzebeth is South Africa’s most-capped player and the enforcer standard by which modern locks are measured — a two-time Rugby World Cup winner whose reputation sends people looking for footage to check whether he really is that terrifying in person. He is. What has changed over the years is everything around the menace: the Sharks second row has evolved from a young tighthead-side bruiser into a complete Test forward.

The physical package remains absurd — very few players his size carry that athleticism into a fifteenth season — but Etzebeth’s real value is positional. He is the Springboks’ defensive lineout organiser, a maul wrecker, and the man tasked with meeting the opposition’s biggest carrier on their best ball. Coaches who analyse South Africa talk about the Etzebeth channel: attacks simply route away from him, which is a form of influence that never appears on a stats sheet.

He has done it across eras and continents — Western Province, Japan, Toulon, then home to Durban with the Sharks — while surviving the Springboks’ most competitive position. South Africa’s lock depth is the envy of world rugby, yet nobody has displaced him for the matches that matter, through the 2019 and 2023 World Cup wins and into the current cycle, in which our database has the Boks losing just three of twenty-six since the start of 2024.

With the four-Test Greatest Rivalry series against New Zealand now on, the world’s two best second-row stables meet head on.