Jacques Nienaber: Springboks have learned to embrace world champion status

When Erasmus and Nienaber returned to South Africa in 2018, they took over a team low on confidence following a series of punishing defeats.

The pair masterminded the Boks' turnaround in fortunes, but they still entered the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan as underdogs, a tag that Springbok teams have thrived with over the years.

That success came four years earlier than Erasmus and Nienaber expected, as they initially targeted winning the 2023 World Cup when they took over the reins.

"It's something that we started when the Boks won the World Cup in 2019," Nienaber began.

"Before then, none of us were world champions; in the group, only Frans Steyn had been there in 2007, so he was actually the only one who understood what being a champion was like.

"On the failure and evolution part, once we became the champions, the big thing is if you don't evolve and improve yourself and find new ways or better ways of doing things, the teams that are chasing you, they just do a gap analysis on you and look at where your KPIs are and where they are lacking and then they know where to focus on to catch up with you and eventually they will overtake you.

"So for us it was important to keep on evolving and changing, but what we did do and what I didn't expect was that with the evolution, you are chasing stretch goals; it's goals that you actually don't know if you will be able to reach them, and sometimes you fail."

The now-Leinster senior coach said that being a champion requires accepting failure and constantly looking for new ways to improve.

He also noted how the team is dealing with the pressure of heading into Test matches as the favourites.

"So that's the other mindset of being a champion. You must be comfortable with the uncomfortable, and the uncomfortable part is the fact that you might fail sometimes, but you are chasing goals that have never been there before. You're venturing into the unknown," he continued.

"That was a mental challenge for us. It was a big challenge moving from an underdog mentality going into the 2019 World Cup to going into the 2023 World Cup, changing our mindset from being an underdog to accepting and embracing being a champion.

"It's fascinating to see the squad now, how much they've embraced it, and how much the squad has grown in terms of that. It's not a foreign concept, and without being arrogant, when I say they've really owned the world champion tag. But not in an arrogant way, they're humble.

"It's fascinating to see them grow from afar, because I'm also a spectator now."