Northern Edition

Select Edition

Northern Northern
Southern Southern
Global Global
New Zealand New Zealand
France France

What Cobus Reinach makes of rookie No10, No8 Springboks starters

Springboks No9 Cobus Reinach (Photo by Warren Little/Getty Images)

Experienced Springboks scrum-half Cobus Reinach has shared his thoughts on having Test-level rookies on either side of him on the Suncorp Stadium pitch this Saturday versus Australia. South Africa open their 2024 Rugby Championship campaign away to the Wallabies in Brisbane and Rassie Erasmus has selected fly-half Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu and No8 Elrigh Louw for their first international starts.  

ADVERTISEMENT

Both newcomers have just four caps each off the bench coming into the tournament opener compared to the more seasoned Reinach, who has 33 caps and was a starter in the 2023 Rugby World Cup semi-final against England. 

He debuted for his country in the 2014 Rugby Championship and this decade-long experience left the Montpellier player sounding confident about the prospect of having a rookie Stormers No10 and a rookie Bulls No8 with him in the eight-nine-10 Test combination this weekend.    

Video Spacer

Springbok head coach Rassie Erasmus on Siya Kolisi’s contract saga with Racing 92

Springbok head coach Rassie Erasmus revealed he was part of the conversations around Siya Kolisi returning to South Africa.

Video Spacer

Springbok head coach Rassie Erasmus on Siya Kolisi’s contract saga with Racing 92

Springbok head coach Rassie Erasmus revealed he was part of the conversations around Siya Kolisi returning to South Africa.

“I haven’t played with him as nine and 10 but the whole week he showed he has got a rugby head on him,” said Reinach about Feinberg-Mngomezulu at a Wednesday media session in Australia. “He is a young boy, but he is hugely talented and I am really excited for him to go out there.  

“He has got the backing of the 22 other players and the rest of the squad here to just go out there and express himself and enjoy the moment. He is going to do well. There is a lot of X-factor in him. He is going to pull a few strings and create a few opportunities.” 

Fixture
Rugby Championship
Australia
7 - 33
Full-time
South Africa
All Stats and Data

What about Louw? “The combinations, we are all good mates and we are a great family here so we sit and talk. Me and Elrigh just went out for coffee. The combination on the field gels quickly.  

“It can gel in a week, it can gel in a day the way we train and the way we rotate the squad. I just tell him he needs to put his head down and scrum the opportunities we get to scrum so Ox (Nche) can have his cake. That’s his main job from the start.” 

ADVERTISEMENT

This year’s Rugby Championship is going ahead with a number of law variations. Among them is the allowance for greater protection of the nine at the base of the scrum, ruck and maul. The rationale behind the potential penalty sanctions is to allow the scrum-half, or the player in that role, to play the ball away cleanly from the phase of play without disruption. 

“We’ll find out on the weekend how that law change will affect us,” said Reinach, this Saturday’s Springboks No9. ‘It’s cleaning up the game around the ruck a little bit which will allow our nines to get out one or two steps and attack the line before we choose our option.  

“But in some games, you don’t want to run so it doesn’t really matter. It’s just how you plan for that week, how you want to attack what exactly we want to do. I’m excited to see how quickly we can get the ball away there.”   

Related

 

ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

LIVE

{{item.title}}

Trending on RugbyPass

Comments

0 Comments
Be the first to comment...

Join free and tell us what you really think!

Sign up for free
ADVERTISEMENT

Latest Features

Comments on RugbyPass

J
JW 2 hours ago
Does South Africa have a future in European competition?

I rated Lowe well enough to be an AB. Remember we were picking the likes of George Bridge above such players so theres no disputing a lot of bad decisions have been made by those last two coaches. Does a team like the ABs need a finicky winger who you have to adapt and change a lot of your style with to get benefit from? No, not really. But he still would have been a basic improvement on players like even Savea at the tail of his career, Bridge, and could even have converted into the answer of replacing Beauden at the back. Instead we persisted with NMS, Naholo, Havili, Reece, all players we would have cared even less about losing and all because Rieko had Lowe's number 11 jersey nailed down.


He was of course only 23 when he decided to leave, it was back in the beggining of the period they had started retaining players (from 2018 onwards I think, they came out saying theyre going to be more aggressive at some point). So he might, all of them, only just missed out.


The main point that Ed made is that situations like Lowe's, Aki's, JGP's, aren't going to happen in future. That's a bit of a "NZ" only problem, because those players need to reach such a high standard to be chosen by the All Blacks, were as a country like Ireland wants them a lot earlier like that. This is basically the 'ready in 3 years' concept Ireland relied on, versus the '5 years and they've left' concept' were that player is now ready to be chosen by the All Blacks (given a contract to play Super, ala SBW, and hopefully Manu).


The 'mercenary' thing that will take longer to expire, and which I was referring to, is the grandparents rule. The new kids coming through now aren't going to have as many gp born overseas, so the amount of players that can leave with a prospect of International rugby offer are going to drop dramatically at some point. All these kiwi fellas playing for a PI, is going to stop sadly.


The new era problem that will replace those old concerns is now French and Japanese clubs (doing the same as NRL teams have done for decades by) picking kids out of school. The problem here is not so much a national identity one, than it is a farm system where 9 in 10 players are left with nothing. A stunted education and no support in a foreign country (well they'll get kicked out of those countries were they don't in Australia).


It's the same sort of situation were NZ would be the big guy, but there weren't many downsides with it. The only one I can think was brought up but a poster on this site, I can't recall who it was, but he seemed to know a lot of kids coming from the Islands weren't really given the capability to fly back home during school xms holidays etc. That is probably something that should be fixed by the union. Otherwise getting someone like Fakatava over here for his last year of school definitely results in NZ being able to pick the cherries off the top but it also allows that player to develop and be able to represent Tonga and under age and possibly even later in his career. Where as a kid being taken from NZ is arguably going to be worse off in every respect other than perhaps money. Not going to develop as a person, not going to develop as a player as much, so I have a lotof sympathy for NZs case that I don't include them in that group but I certainly see where you're coming from and it encourages other countries to think they can do the same while not realising they're making a much worse experience/situation.

144 Go to comments
TRENDING
TRENDING Young Highlanders tested by Jamie Joseph's preseason Jamie Joseph testing young Highlanders
Search