Jacques Nienaber reveals Rassie Erasmus' role in shaping his career as a rugby coach

It's well-documented that Nienaber and Erasmus first crossed paths during their time in the army, but their friendship really blossomed with the Cats.

At the time, Nienaber was employed as the Super Rugby team's physio, a side comprised of players from the Lions and Cheetahs, while Erasmus captained the team.

The then-Bok flanker sustained a nasty ankle injury, and in a bid to remain available to the team, Erasmus moved in with Nienaber, who would ice the injury.

"We met each other in the army briefly, but then the relationship within rugby started with Rassie injuring his ankle, and back in the day, you iced a person every four hours if you wanted to have good results. We wanted him back on the pitch as quickly as possible," Nienaber reminisced in an interview with SuperSport.

"When I was working with the Cats, I had a spare room in the suite that I stayed in, so he moved into that room and during the night when he was asleep, I had an alarm going off every four hours, put ice on his ankle, 20 minutes later, took it off and went back to bed and did it four hours later.

"It's amazing to think where we are now. I would have never thought in my wildest dreams that we would be sitting here in Ireland with everything that has happened since 2018, when we joined the Boks."

Once Erasmus hung up his boots, he took over the head coach reins at the Cheetahs. Even as an inexperienced coach, he was renowned for innovation, and it wasn't just his traffic light antics on the stadium roofs.

Nienaber was employed as the side's strength and conditioning coach but would get his first taste as an assistant when Erasmus tasked him with running the team's defence, a position that did not exist at the Cheetahs.

The Bloemfontein outfit had a much tighter budget than the other South African unions, and Erasmus got creative in a bid to make sure that his players did not feel as if they were lacking anything in comparison to the likes of the Sharks, Stormers, Lions and Bulls.

He also hailed Erasmus' ability to see potential in people.

"When we started at the Cheetahs, they didn't have the monetary resources of the Bulls or the big franchises back like the Stormers," Nienaber explained.

"But when Rassie took over, he wanted to have a high-performance environment, so that our players don't feel like they were lacking in comparison to the bigger unions, like John McFarland was the defence coach at the Bulls - at the time, the Cheetahs didn't even know that there was such a thing as a defence coach. It was a foreign concept for us.

"So I was lucky that at that time, when I started moving from a S&C point of view into a defence post, I basically had a blank canvas because our players didn't know what was good or bad in terms of a defence coach.

"They had never had one. So, I was lucky in that perspective, so I could fake it until I made it. I think that's what I did in the beginning.

"So I was at the right place at the right time, and there was an opportunity within professionalism in rugby for people to move into those positions.

"Most defence coaches at the time came out of rugby league, and they were probably two or three years ahead of rugby with regard to professionalism and having a full coaching group with a specialist attack and defence coach.

"Back in the day, it was just a head coach and an assistant coach. The head coach was probably responsible for the forwards, and the assistant coach was responsible for the backs.

"Rassie was very much into the new way of doing things. I went from physio into S&C, and then from S&C, that opportunity came. I must say Rassie was the one who said, 'Jacques, would you think of going into a position like this?'

"That's a superpower of Rassie; he sees potential in people that they don't necessarily always see in themselves. I was always keen to have a crack at it, so that's how it began."

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