Erasmus has flagged that managing the return of injured players — Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu and Ethan Hooker the headline names — may actually be harder than rotating his established stars across a 14-Test season. The core tension: how do you reintroduce a player of Sacha's calibre without throwing him into an All Blacks Test cold, while still keeping him on a meaningful development track toward 2027? Erasmus's answer is essentially bespoke scheduling — individual roadmaps for each player rather than a single squad-wide rotation model. The piece also flags the broader tightrope: a packed schedule that includes the Rugby Championship, a Nations Championship-style competition and the New Zealand series leaves little margin for the kind of experimental selection that accelerates development. Erasmus is equally alert to the trap of fixating on the All Blacks series at the expense of Argentina and Australia, where the Boks have been punished before.