Siya Kolisi returns from the hamstring injury he sustained against Argentina three weeks ago to captain the Springboks in Saturday's second Test against New Zealand at Cape Town Stadium (kick-off 5.10pm), with Rassie Erasmus openly shouldering blame for the 33-16 defeat in Johannesburg last week.
The result leaves the Boks needing a win in Cape Town to retain any chance of taking the four-Test Rugby's Greatest Rivalry series. Defeat would mean the best they could achieve across the remaining Tests in Soweto and Baltimore is a 2-2 draw.
"I'm definitely nervous again," Erasmus said. "We're one game down, and if we don't win this game, we can't win the series; we can only draw it. Nerves are there for sure. But we've been under this kind of pressure a lot, and hopefully we can turn things around this weekend."
Erasmus was pointed in how he distributed accountability for Ellis Park. "The plan didn't win the game for us, but it's definitely also not the players who lost the game. I'm taking responsibility for some of the decisions we made. Some of it falls more on me than on the players, to be honest." He added that the review identified accuracy as the primary issue, with the Boks dominant up to around the 60-minute mark before the game slipped away.
Kolisi's hamstring issue was diagnosed as a grade two tear, with Erasmus confirming the captain completed full-pace running on Monday and Tuesday without discomfort. Pieter-Steph du Toit, who carried the captaincy in the interim and reaches his 100th Test cap on Saturday, hands the armband back partly to allow him to focus on his performance on a landmark occasion. Du Toit starts in the loose trio alongside Kolisi and Jasper Wiese, with Paul de Villiers dropping out of the matchday squad entirely.
"In this match you probably don't want captaincy responsibilities, with the 100 to think about, and on top of that needing to play well," Erasmus said. "Siya is our captain."