Watch every second of Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry live and on demand via Stan Sport.<\/a><\/p>\n“We have to find a way to get back, we got a good hiding from a good New Zealand side,” Erasmus told the post-match news conference.<\/p>\n
“We’ll lay low and not read the papers and work very hard. We have no excuses because we could have won the game.<\/p>\n
“We \u200cmust keep our \u200cmouth closed,” added \u2060Erasmus, often the source of controversy with his maverick approach to the game \u200band contentious outbursts.<\/p>\n
However, he refused to accept that the unexpected defeat was a catastrophic setback as New Zealand make a first full scale tour of South Africa in 30 years.<\/p>\n
“We’ve been in many catastrophic situations before. We lost the first test against British and Irish Lions,” he said of the 2021 series where they come back and grabbed a \u2060narrow 2-1 win.<\/p>\n
“We lost the opening game of the (2019) World Cup \u200cto New \u200bZealand, everybody says that was catastrophic.” South Africa recovered from that setback to win the tournament in Japan.<\/p>\n
“So we’ve \u200bbeen in \u200ca lot of catastrophic situations in our lives. Obviously, we’re now in a position that if we want \u200bto win a series, we have to win three games on the trot.<\/p>\n
“Without a doubt, it puts them (New Zealand) in a very good position, which they thoroughly deserve.<\/p>\n
“And now we have to go to Cape \u200bTown \u200band try and win there, then it’s \u200ball level. But we still have to win three matches \u200cin a row. So I wouldn’t say catastrophic, because we there is a way out and that’s winning three matches on the trot.”<\/p>\n
Erasmus avoided excuses but admitted his side had several chances where they might have made more considered choices.<\/p>\n
“When you look in hindsight, there’s a lot of opportunities that we didn’t convert, but I think there’s two \u200bor three big moments where we just let the game get away from us, not because we wanted \u200bto, but because New Zealand \u2060forced those errors onto us by being really, really intense and sharp,” he \u200badded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"South Africa coach Rassie Erasmus said he would lie low, avoid reading the newspapers and try and figure…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":864993,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[10751,64,63,760,85,2995],"class_list":["post-864992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-all-blacks","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-springboks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864992","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=864992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864992\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/864993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=864992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=864992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=864992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}