Siya needs half an hour to get up to speed

Siya Kolisi has an important 20 minutes to half an hour of rugby ahead of him as he searches for full match sharpness ahead of the more difficult games that lie ahead of his Springbok team in the World Cup.

The Bok captain was on Wednesday named on the bench for the largely experimental team that will tackle Namibia in Saturday’s second Pool game here at the Toyota Stadium, near the current Bok base in Nagoya. Jesse Kriel is the only squad member who was ruled out of selection, the rest of the players missing this game are first choice players who are being rested.

However, Erasmus felt that given the way that Kolisi struggled in trying to make the step up to a game played with the sort of intensity he had yet to experience at international level this season, he should be part of the match day squad again in a quest to get much needed game time.

“Siya has been phased back from his long term injury and still has some game time he needs to put into the bank before he can be where he’d want to be,” said Erasmus.

The coach said that although the match against the All Blacks hadn’t been played to quite the tempo that he had anticipated, he felt that Kolisi had struggled with the pace of the opening World Cup Pool B game. It was the reason he was replaced in the second half.

However, Kolisi can use the 20 to 30 minutes he can expect to play against Namibia to get him completely up to speed so that he can comfortably lead the team in the looming important Pool decider against Italy on 4 October and then hopefully the quarterfinal against Ireland nearly two weeks later.

“This Namibia game will give us another chance to put Siya through another 20 or 30 minutes. I think then he will be good to go a full 80 minutes (the next game he starts),” said Erasmus.

Every team needs the captain to be performing and leading from the front but Kolisi spent a lot of time sidelined by injury during the course of the South African season and only made his return to the field shortly before the World Cup.

Erasmus bent the rules for Kolisi when he was injured playing for the Stormers against the Lions three games before the end of Super Rugby. While he ignored other players who weren’t fully fit and might carry injury doubts for much of the build-up to the World Cup, he kept Kolisi as part of the group.

The captain was famously asked to act as a water boy so that he could feel part of the action when the Boks opened the 2019 international year with a rousing victory over Australia in Johannesburg. Kolisi’s Stormers teammate Eben Etzebeth captained the Boks that day, with Duane Vermeulen taking over for the draw with New Zealand and then the away win over Argentina that won the Boks the Rugby Championship.

When the Boks went overseas Kolisi linked up with Western Province and played a little more than a half against the Pumas in a Currie Cup game to prove his readiness for a return to the Bok set-up.

He was duly selected for his first test match of the season when the Boks played the Pumas in a warm-up game, dubbed the Farewell test, ahead of the World Cup, in Pretoria. He played more than a half in a game where the Boks, captained by Schalk Brits that day to allow Kolisi to focus on his own play, scraped home to a narrow win. Brits was appointed captain as Kolisi was too early in his comeback to be expected to finish the game.

Neither that game nor the one that followed against Japan, where he took the captaincy reins for the first time this season, were up with a match against the All Blacks in terms of intensity and physicality.

So the Yokohama Pool B opener was a step up in level for the likeable Bok captain.

“It was a struggle in this particular game,” said Erasmus, who admitted that he had problems trying to get his planning through with regards to the timing of his replacements.

“I wanted to get Frans (Steyn) on during the game, but a lot of things happened that prevented me from managing the bench as well as I would have liked. I wanted to manage the bench better because I thought in the last 15 minutes we would need some speed.

“But the game was actually not that fast. I measured the GPS stats and if you compare it to the Wellington test match a few weeks ago and the Loftus test last year it was actually a slow game.

They had a kicking game, they kicked seven more kicks than us. We ran a lot more than them. Maybe we weren’t as creative as them but we had more ball in hand. It was difficult because we thought it would be about who’d keep up in the game. So when we had to make the substitutions, and I am trying to be as honest as I can, Pieter-Steph had suffered a bit of a bump to the knee, and we had already taken Siya off because by that stage he was struggling with the pace of the game.

“Because we have been phasing him it was the next level in terms of intensity and physicality, it was a step up in contact situations, even though the pace wasn’t that high.”