No surprises: Boks insist Etzebeth will play off the bench against All Blacks

Springbok assistant coach Mzwandile Stick says there will be no Eben Etzebeth starting surprise for the All Blacks when the two teams go head-to-head in their Rugby Championship clash at Ellis Park on Saturday (kick-off 5pm).

Bok enforcer Etzebeth has been a big talking point in the build-up to the game this week, after it was announced that he was in danger of missing out on the match on Monday, before being left out of the team on Tuesday.

Coach Rassie Erasmus then said he was still in the running to play if he could prove his fitness, and on Wednesday he was cleared to play off the bench, and all of this was exacerbated by the Boks being in a lock crisis with five frontline locks currently ruled out.

Starting line-up for Etzebeth?

Etzebeth has come through the training week with flying colours and at the pre-match press conference Stick was asked if the Boks could still pull a surprise by elevating Etzebeth to the starting line-up for the match.

“No we won’t change that. He is on the bench. We have selected a strong team. Pieter-Steph du Toit and Ruan (Nortje), who is grabbing his opportunity with both hands, are starting (at lock) for sure,” said Stick with a smile.

“Against the All Blacks we are probably going to need to play until the last second. So to have guys like Eben and others on the bench, they will bring the impact that we will be looking for in the second half.

“Internally Eben was always in the team. It is just because Rassie (Erasmus) had to announce the team on Tuesday that we left him out. We wanted to give him a fair chance to prove his fitness.

“He trained full out on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and didn’t miss any training sessions. So there was no reason for us not to select him and he is looking good. I think he will bring a massive impact from the bench when it is needed.”

No slip-ups

The Boks will start the match against their biggest rivals as favourites, which they don’t often do, but will have to be wary not to make any mistakes, like they did in 2022 when they comfortably beat the All Blacks in Mbombela, but then slipped up at Ellis Park a week later to lose comfortably.

“If we go back that far I think we will be shooting ourselves in the foot. The focus for us is on what we have been trying to achieve this season. We have new personnel in our squad, playing and coaching wise,” explained Stick.

“So the key thing for us is to keep getting better and improving on the way we want to play the game. When you play against the All Blacks the biggest thing you learn is that if you aren’t switched on they will punish you.

“When we played them in Mbombela we started well, controlled the game and put them under pressure, and it was an 80 minute performance. Then at Ellis Park we started slow, they built momentum, controlled the game and they won comfortably in the end.

“So we have taken some lessons from those games in 2022. We can’t afford to start slow, it has to be an 80-minute performance and we have been talking about that the whole week.”