1
Erasmus issues update on Siya Kolisi's injury and it's not good regarding the start of the Rugby Championship
By Online Editors
Rassie Erasmus has confirmed skipper Siya Kolisi will miss the Springboks’ opening rounds of the Rugby Championship later this month.
South Africa kick off their tournament with fixtures in Johannesburg against Australia and in Wellington against New Zealand, but their captain will be absent and could instead feature in some Currie Cup action to get back up to speed for over Test matches.
Kolisi has been part of a 39-strong training squad preparing this week in Pretoria and Erasmus has outlined how the goal is for his skipper to be ready for the World Cup in Japan.
“We will probably a bit conservative with Siya to make sure he is ready for the Rugby World Cup, which is the most important part of the year,” explained Erasmus about a player who suffered a knee injury in the latter stages of the Super Rugby season.
“We will wait for the results of his scans on Friday, and then we will take it from there and see what the return to play protocol will be.
“Siya will be training with us until we leave for New Zealand and then he will probably stay behind to play one or two Currie Cup games. Thereafter, we plan to get him back into playing Test match rugby, hopefully in the match against Argentina (in Pretoria on August 17), and then it’s on the plane with us to Japan.
“If we push him now to go with us to New Zealand, we might end up with more than a 50 percent chance that he won’t go with us to the World Cup.”
In the injury-absence of Kolisi, Erasmus indicated he will consider more than one captain to lead the Springboks in their opening matches of the international season.
“We have a few players who need game time, who we want to consider for captaincy. Eben Etzebeth (if he is cleared to play) and Pieter-Steph du Toit haven’t played a lot lately – both need game time and might be considered for the captaincy, while we also have the likes of Duane Vermeulen, Steven Kitshoff and Malcolm Marx, all of whom have captained their respective franchise teams this season.”
Erasmus added that he intends to make a call on the captaincy as early as next week: “Depending on how things will go after Siya’s scan results and Eben’s X-ray, we will make that call on Monday. We have some good options compared to last year in terms of candidates for the captaincy.”
WATCH: Episode three of the RugbyPass Rugby Explorer series see Jim Hamilton take a trek through South African rugby
Trending on RugbyPass
2
Leicester fight off Premiership rivals to keep Ollie Hassell-Collins
3
Henry Arundell lined up for early England homecoming
4
Stuart Lancaster takes giant stride towards immediate Racing 92 exit
5
Latest Comments
It's just an endemic problem within EPCR. Glasgow threw away the game on the weekend too by resting players. Those sorts of crazy results are all over tournament.
The closest knockout result in 23' was a 14 point win. 24' had a 1, 3 and 12 point margin games, the rest all 30/40 point thrashings by the home team. In every single game.
Haha that's a great line, thanks for the share.
The issue is not really solving the itinerary for South African teams, that is easy, the problem is solving it for the teams that are required to come back from South Africa and win the following week. The perfect example of this was La Rochelle last year having to beat Stormers away and then return for a day to France before heading off to Dublin. They consequently but unsurprising got spanked. It's the same problem Super Rugby created when it required higher ranking sides to travel to another countries top team at the pointy end of the season.
As has been discussed in a recent article about England having too many teams in EPCR, the problems are many and varied in general. Combining EPCR and league games into a signle itinerary/season is no problem, both comps simply need to get together at planning stage and be prepared to have flexible weekends where the two comps are swapped around, but is it going to be as easy to suggest that the EPCR just needs a week off from the Ro16 stage to Quarters (or pool to Ro16 I can remember which it was)? What if that LaRvStomers game was a quarter, when is the semi, or the final going to be played?
South Africa's future is, of course, in South Africa. There is talk of a group wanting to create a Super League in America, touring big cities, no doubt some in the Middle East being included, in a World Series type format of the games biggest stars. It's a terrible idea by itself, but especially when there is already Europe, the ME, and all of Africa crying out for more high level rugby, and South Africa's huge abundance of players that can provide it.
Go to commentsDragging you UP you mean Ojohn.
Go to comments