Despite Pieter-Steph du Toit walking off with a badly injured nose, I was glad that none of the Springboks suffered serious injury in the Barbarians’ 38-35 win over Argentina on Saturday.
That was always my fear heading into the game with so many Bok stars playing -that one would get hurt and that it would jeopardise his chances of going to next year’s World Cup.
In my books, the Barbarians team should always be made up of guys who can’t make their international first teams.
Argentina No.8 Juan Manuel Leguizamon is a good example of this. He is not in the national team’s setup at this point in time and then showed coach Mario Ledesma what he can do when he scored the first try of the match.
The same goes for Schalk Brits, who has been warming the Bok bench, bar one match, since coming out of retirement. It was his offload to Leguizamon that led to the first try by the way.
But exactly why Du Toit, Siya Kolisi and a number of the other Boks who should have been rested and spending time with their families were on the pitch, I don’t know.
That call won’t go down as one of the best coach Rassie Erasmus has made in 2018.
I guess his thinking was to give his Bok spine one more game heading into the World Cup to iron out some issues.
Luckily it didn’t come at a cost...