Springboks' coaching team have noses to the grindstone

New Springboks coach Jacques Nienaber hasn't been hanging around wondering during the coronavirus pandemic.

The break in the Super Rugby season due to the virus has allowed Nienaber and his team to get plenty of analysis done on prospective opponents based on the limited footage available in the so-far truncated season.

Nienaber told supersport.com, "It's a strange time, I must say. It very quickly became part of life and it probably changes what normal will be going forward [in the future].

"It will be a time in history that we will remember how things have changed.

"From our side though, we are still busy. But the nice thing for me is that one side of coaching is the physical coaching on the field and the other side is the planning part.

"For us, nothing has changed. We are still planning as we would have done anyway.

"The only thing now is that we don't physically now have an alignment camp – we just did a virtual one with the Sharks over Skype and Microsoft Teams, which are one of our partners. We are quite lucky with that," he said.

The tough part of the work was not knowing if there would be anything at the end of all the planning.

"You plan for Test matches and at the moment nothing has been cancelled and everything is still going on.

"It is such a fluid stage that you planning might not be Scotland, but rather Georgia in the first game. Or it might be Argentina first game. We don't know. There are so many variables.

"The nice thing for us with rugby stopping is that in terms of analysis we are catching up. When the Six Nations were on, so were Super Rugby and we were focused on analysing Super Rugby performances. Because everything has stopped now, we are catching up to where everything has paused," he said.

The Springbok coaching team have been able to run alignment camps in South Africa with all teams except the Sharks, who missed the cut when the lockdown started while in Europe, assistant coach Felix Jones has been looking after the European-based players and had two camps with them before the lockdown.

"Every player was assessed, except the guys in Japan who we couldn't get to – we were planning to get to them in May. The first round of alignment camps has been down with everybody. In terms of that we are on par," he said.