“Rassie knows which buttons to press with us. He’s got them on speed dial.” Trevor Nyakane, 68 caps, two World Cups, on what Siya Kolisi meant in Baltimore.
Trevor Nyakane did not wait for the question.
Steven Kitshoff had just read out Siya Kolisi’s pitchside line after the 43-28 win at M&T Bank Stadium on Saturday 12 September, the one that sealed the inaugural Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry: Rassie Erasmus “reminds us of where we come from”. Nyakane cut across him.
“Just full stop right there. What you just said right now, Kitsy, literally sums everything up in one as to what this team stands for. And yes, I’ve been in that circle. I’ve heard everything he said. Kitsy was right. Rassie knows which buttons to press with us. He’s got them on speed dial. He doesn’t have to think twice.”
Speed dial is the line the show put in its own description. The button is the story of Rassie Erasmus man management, and Nyakane got to it inside two minutes. Kolisi had already said it once at pitchside, then sang the rest.
So which is it: the best man-manager in the game, or the easiest room in the game to motivate? Pick one before you read what was on the whiteboard.
He knows where Steven Kitshoff played ball
Nyakane’s first move was to rule out the obvious answer. The button is homework.
“He understands every single person… He knows where Steven Kitshoff comes from. He knows where Steven Kitshoff played ball. He knows Steven Kitshoff’s background. He knows Trevor’s one. He knows the next player personally. And that, I think, makes him so deadly, cuz he knows, okay, I can speak to Trevor like this, but Trevor won’t align with something if I speak to him like this, cuz he won’t understand that part. It’s not within him. And then the next person, and then the next person, and he puts it together into one team where he brings everything, aligns it, and we only have one target.”
“Deadly” is the word to keep. Nyakane is describing an accurate coach, one who has done the reading on every man in the squad and gives each of them the same message in a different way. A good message given once to a room is worth less than an ordinary one given twenty-three times in twenty-three forms.
Nyakane is still playing, at the Sharks, and still eligible, which makes the next line unusual.
“Coach Rassie, to me, is one of the best people managers out there when it comes to a team. And I think it puts him above most coaches out there, cuz he knows how to relate to players. He will always tell you, ‘I’ve played the game. I’ve also made mistakes. I’ve also done good.’ So whatever you guys are going through, he’s been there and he’s done that.”
Nyakane has been here before. A month ago on the same show he said Siya Kolisi never shouts, and that the quiet is why it works. A captain who does not raise his voice, and a coach who does not need to, because the message was fitted to the listener before it was said.
Rassie Erasmus man management starts with a whiteboard
Kitshoff, 83 caps and two World Cups before a neck injury ended his career last year, supplied the picture.
“That picture that always stood out for me was when we all sat in a room and Rassie put on the whiteboard all the names, and then he put where you’re from. And he said, like, Steven Kitshoff, Strand… and he just put all the guys’ names. I don’t know if you remember, Trevor. It’s quite a visual I keep remembering when I watch Chasing the Sun.”
A list of names is a team sheet. A list of names with a town next to each one is a different document. It is the reason, written down, in front of the man it applies to and in front of everybody else.
Kitshoff said the image comes back to him when he watches Chasing the Sun, the documentary on the 2019 World Cup. He did not say the scene is in the film, and no account of the film mentions a board of hometowns. It is a memory of a team room, from a man who was in it.
The whole exchange runs from 41:09 in the episode.
The camp on the Vaal where the slogans went
The whiteboard has a date, roughly. Kitshoff put it at the very start.
“Trev, I don’t know if you remember, in 2018 when Rassie took over and we had that function on the Vaal River, that alignment camp, and he said, like, we’re falling away with all these slogans and words and ‘we’re going to do this for this’ or whatever, and he just said, let the main thing stay the main thing… The main thing is you’re representing your country at the highest level. You need to do whatever it takes to make sure you perform.”
The timing checks out. Erasmus ran his first alignment camps, the pre-season gatherings where the whole squad is put on one plan, in April 2018, in Vanderbijlpark on the Vaal and in Durban. His first Test in charge came two months later, a 22-20 defeat by Wales in Washington.
Nothing had been won. The whiteboard and the sentence come from before the 2019 final, and before the one in Paris four years later.
The order matters. Slogans out first. Then the addresses.
Kitshoff said he gets asked about it for a living now.
“People often ask me in interviews or when I do keynote speaking, people ask me, what’s that secret sauce? What’s Rassie? And my answer is always the same. It’s Rassie understands his players. Rassie knows how to pull guys into a direction and make them all work to a common goal.”
Which is the polished version. Nyakane gave the raw one.
What the button actually is
“When coach Rassie presses that button, you start vibrating, like, okay, you know what? We’ve worked so hard for this. We’re trying to put our country together, even if it’s that little small part of it. We’re doing our bit to make our people happy, to make the kids that are running in the locations that don’t have shoes, the kids that are struggling, they also look at the Springboks and be like, ‘Wow, this is South Africa. This is what South Africa is capable of.’ Whether it’s a black or white or coloured or Indian or whatever, we come together. And coach Rassie knows exactly when he needs to press that button, and the team knows once that button has been pressed, it’s time to go.”
Read that against the whiteboard. The button is a fact about each player, written down in 2018 and pointed at ever since. “Where we come from” sounds like sentiment into a pitchside microphone. In the room it is a list.
That leaves Nyakane’s own word for it, “vibrating”.
Why a hometown survives the 60th minute and a slogan does not
Every coach has a Friday message, and most of them are gone by the hour mark of a Test, when the lungs have gone and the scoreboard is the wrong way round. A slogan is words, and words are the first thing to go. A town is attached to a face.
A player defending an eight-point lead with a quarter of an hour left cannot recite a value statement and does not need to. He can picture a street.
The whiteboard is the only form of the message a tired man can still hold. Kitshoff has said the Monday review is where a Springboks camp actually hurts; the Friday board is what gets a player to Saturday.
The tell is not on the field. Kitshoff named where to look.
“And you could see it in the eyes of the players that were singing the anthem. You can see it in the fans. You can see it in Siya’s post-match. You can see it in Rassie’s eyes when the guys were taking photos of the trophy.”
Erasmus gave his own version at the Baltimore press conference the same night: the people on the farm, the boy in the township, the people in the shopping mall. “That’s what drives us.”
Kolisi’s went out on the pitch first, carried in full by RNZ, and the part Kitshoff read on air came in the SuperSport pitchside interview: “The players that are not in the group today, the guys that are injured, the guys that couldn’t make the tour, we do this for them.”
Read next: Bryn Hall made the Rassie Erasmus greatest-coach case on numbers, and the stat he named belongs to Steve Hansen. Nyakane and Kitshoff have just made the same case on people.
Your turn: is the Rassie Erasmus button coaching, or geography?
Two ways to read it. Either the button is a coaching method any national coach could copy, a whiteboard and the homework on every player, and the rest of the world has simply not bothered. Or it only works because of where these particular players come from, and no other union has a button like it to press. One of those is coaching. The other is geography. Which is it? Settle it below.
Frequently asked
What did Trevor Nyakane say about Rassie Erasmus?
On For The Love Of Rugby: South Africa on Sunday 13 September, Nyakane said Erasmus “knows which buttons to press with us” and has “got them on speed dial”, knows every player’s background and speaks to each one differently, and is “one of the best people managers out there”.
What is the Rassie Erasmus man management style?
Individual rather than collective, according to two players who spent six years under him. Erasmus knows where each player comes from and where he played, and fits the message to each one. Kitshoff remembers a whiteboard with every name and hometown on it, and a 2018 alignment camp where the slogans went and one sentence stayed: let the main thing stay the main thing.
What did Siya Kolisi say about Rassie Erasmus after the Baltimore Test?
That Erasmus “knows how to get us up” and “reminds us of where we come from”, and that the team plays for the injured players, the players who could not make the tour and the people of South Africa.
