Sir John Kirwan has hailed the brilliance of Rassie Erasmus as he compared the \u201cdifferent philosophies\u201d of the Springboks and All Blacks head coaches.<\/p>\n
The 60-year-old has, at times, been a fierce critic of South African rugby and some of the innovations of their boss.<\/p>\n
However, even Kirwan held his hand up after the Boks<\/a> visited Wellington and put 43 points on New Zealand, inflicting their worst-ever defeat.<\/p>\n That result came after Erasmus<\/a> made mass alterations to his backline \u2013 five personnel and one positional \u2013 a decision the ex-wing initially thought was \u2018panicked\u2019.<\/p>\n Conservative Razor<\/p>\n In comparison, Robertson<\/a> has generally preferred to err on the side of caution, opting for continuity and keeping changes to a minimum.<\/p>\n \u201cThe amazing thing about Rassie, under that pressure, he doesn\u2019t fold \u2013 he just does what he wants. He changes the team and does a whole lot of different stuff, and wins,\u201d Kirwan said on the Rivals podcast.<\/p>\n As Erasmus experiments, knowing that they need depth and some younger players to come through ahead of the 2027 Rugby World Cup, Robertson has been far more conservative.<\/p>\n The 51-year-old has received criticism for his decision to stick with certain players, such as Rieko Ioane, who have not performed well for a consistent length of time.<\/p>\n But Kirwan believes that it is a player rather than a coach issue with the current head honcho simply not having enough talent at his disposal to follow the Springboks\u2019 path, according to the former Italy and Japan boss.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think that we have the depth that we had before. When you talk about full-back, someone just doesn\u2019t come straight into my mind, where we can go, \u2018we can try that\u2019. It\u2019s the same with first five (fly-half),\u201d Kirwan said.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we\u2019ve got some depth issues. When guys like Richie Mo\u2019unga go overseas and they go over for money, we\u2019re suffering like Australia\u2019s suffering.<\/p>\n \u201cWill Skelton having to go back to his French side will weaken them because they don\u2019t have two others like him, and that\u2019s where I think South Africa has definitely got the jump on us at the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n