Rassie: We’re not messing around with Willemse’s future

Rassie Erasmus and his Springbok training squad concluded their week-long camp in Stellenbosch on Friday and professed themselves happy with their prep before embarking on their European tour on Sunday.

Here are some of the issues Erasmus touched on.

On Damian Willemse being shifted around so much…

You can look at it two ways. For one, you can say you’re buggering a guy around and he’s going to be a jack of all trades and maybe a master of none. Or you can also say that this young guy is being phased into senior rugby in different positions, and the more you do that, the more you get used to how the opposition think in those different positions.

Last year Damian played fullback in the Currie Cup final, and now he is playing at 12, so he could have the experience of winning it back-to-back in different positions. I don’t think it’s messing around with his future.

On the availability of the overseas-based players…

All of these players’ cases are pretty simple. If you enforce World Rugby’s Regulation Nine, they have to pitch up the Sunday before a Test match, as long as it’s in a designated Test window. We can say at any time that we want a specific player.

But there’s a human factor involved too. There are families involved and futures involved. You don’t want to ruin things because you’re stubborn and enforcing regulations. The relationships we have with clubs isn’t really give-and-take, but it’s a fair one. The only guy I can’t give you clarity on is Franco Mostert.

If he’s a Gloucester player, he won’t play against England (next week), if he’s a Lions player, he will be. The nice thing is he won’t need to catch up on things because he’s played a lot with us.

Whether veteran Gio Aplon will be back in the national squad…

If I could give you the squad ten days beforehand, I would. I’m not a guy who wants to play my cards close to my chest. Most of the time, it’s really just about not trying to distract some players because they’re still playing Currie Cup.

Willie le Roux won’t be available for all the Tests and he’s got a great boot in those conditions. Those conditions are different, I doesn’t matter whether you were in good shape before that game. Sometimes you can’t get tempo into the game, it’s more tactical and high ball and kicking game plays a big role.

A guy like Damian will get his chance and Willie will be available. But if you have an experienced guy with a good left boot, knows French conditions and is really performing well (in Japan) to date, you have to consider him. Aphiwe (Dyantyi) and S’bu (Nkosi) are doing well but there’s not a lot of experience around them.

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