Springbok head coach Jacques Nienaber is a cool customer irrespective of the circumstances, offering the perfect foil to the eccentric genius that is Rassie Erasmus.
Following a titanic clash with world number one ranked Ireland in Paris, a match in which his came up just short 13 - 8. A South African journalist asked Nienaber whether his side could still win the World Cup.
Initially chuckling at the question, Nienaber responded by saying, "Hendrik ya, we can still. In 2019, did you think we could win the World Cup when we lost to New Zealand?
"Obviously, we are in this competition to win it, everybody is in this competition to win it.
"Teams that lose a game in the pool stages must work hard to get out of the pool, so definitely we can still win it.
"I mean, we played against the number one team in the world, and we lost by five points.
"We had an opportunity in the 79th minute to get a result, but we didn't.
"So hats off to Ireland, they were better than us on the night, and that is the bottom line.
"But that is the number one team in the world, and we are the number two team in the world, and the margin is very small. So we will have to work harder at the stuff we were not good at, and if we can fix that and have a little bit of luck, then we can win the World Cup yeah.
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