The Rassie Erasmus Roadshow continued on Tuesday. What was supposed to be a routine team announcement with South Africa coach Jacques Nienaber descended into an unfiltered charge at refereeing integrity, Sir Clive Woodward and mysterious activity on social media.
Erasmus, the South African director of rugby, has taken to Twitter this week to voice his disapproval about a number of decisions in the first Test.
He has been retweeting posts from a mystery 'Jaco Johan' account — and on Tuesday he kicked off the show by denying rumours that he is the man behind the posts.
South Africa rugby director Rassie Erasmus went on the offensive in his Tuesday media call
He retweeted a video the user uploaded which highlighted incidents that didn't go their way
'That's actually why I'm at the press conference,' said Erasmus, as soon as the floor was opened to questions. 'I'm actually not Jaco Johan. I'm Rassie Erasmus. I follow Jaco Johan. He's a big supporter of us and a really funny guy. He's been feeding me some really good clips for a while now.
'Why am I so active on Twitter? I just retweeted two or three things I thought were accurate. I tweeted twice just for a simple reason: as director of rugby, the medical department is part of our department. When something makes sense to me I like to retweet it.
'I thought the way Cheslin Kolbe was picked off the ground (by Mako Vunipola) could have been a serious injury.
'We teach our schoolchildren that you leave a player as he is, because it is dangerous (to pick them up). We wouldn't like our players this Saturday to pick up every Lions player who is on their back.'
Erasmus was not even scheduled to be there on Zoom. He was a late addition — but quickly became the main event. He said that complaints were lodged through the official World Rugby channel but they did not hear back for days.
'We tried to do that on Sunday but they didn't come back to us,' he added. 'On Monday they didn't come back to us. This morning we got the report back. So that takes a bit of a while. When you get it only on a Tuesday morning it does disrupt your week.'
