South Africa coach Rassie Erasmus has made two personnel changes and one positional to the team that trounced New Zealand for their Test against Argentina in Durban.<\/p>\n
Injuries sustained by full-back Aphelele Fassi and lock Lood de Jager in Wellington this month has ruled them out of the fifth round.<\/p>\n
Damian Willemse, one of the stars of the triumph in New Zealand, moves from inside centre to replace Fassi in the No 15 shirt.<\/p>\n
Veteran Damian de Allende fills the gap left by Willemse and forms a centre partnership with Canan Moodie.<\/p>\n
In a straight change at lock, Eben Etzebeth, the most capped Springbok with 136 Test appearances, comes in for injury-prone De Jager.<\/p>\n
Fly-half Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, who was forced to retire early in Wellington with a concussion, has been declared fit to face the Pumas at Kings Park in the Indian Ocean port city.<\/p>\n
With two rounds remaining, Australia are the surprise Championship leaders with 11 points, South Africa and New Zealand have 10 each and Argentina nine.<\/p>\n
Erasmus says this is a vital match for them and the Pumas, who beat New Zealand and Australia in the first four rounds of the competition.<\/p>\n
He says Argentina have made big strides in the last few seasons, and have an astute coach in Felipe Contepomi.<\/p>\n
The Springbok coach says Argentina boast a strong forward pack and extremely talented backs, so they pose threats all around.<\/p>\n
He says they know that two good results could place them in a decent position to win the competition, so it is going to be a hard grind of a match.<\/p>\n
Erasmus, who played key coaching roles in the back-to-back World Cup triumphs of 2019 and 2023, has also made two changes to his bench, which has a five forwards-three backs split.<\/p>\n
Jan-Hendrik Wessels, who can operate as a loosehead and a hooker, will provide cover for starting hooker Malcolm Marx.<\/p>\n
The Springboks host Los Pumas at 3.05am Sunday at Kings Park, Durban.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the All Blacks play the Wallabies at 5.05pm Saturday at Eden Park.<\/p>\n
SPRINGBOKS (15-1): Damian Willemse; Cheslin Kolbe, Canan Moodie, Damian de Allende, Ethan Hooker; Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, Cobus Reinach; Jasper Wiese, Pieter-Steph du Toit, Siya Kolisi (capt); Ruan Nortje, Eben Etzebeth; Thomas du Toit, Malcolm Marx, Ox Nche<\/p>\n
Replacements: Jan-Hendrik Wessels, Boan Venter, Wilco Louw, RG Snyman, Kwagga Smith, Morne van den Berg, Manie Libbok, Andre Esterhuizen.<\/p>\n
Source: Rugby.com.au<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"South Africa coach Rassie Erasmus has made two personnel changes and one positional to the team that trounced…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":164694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,17140,85],"class_list":["post-164693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-rugby-championship","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}