When we were thrown together, there was no real culture because there were differences in our approaches to the game. We came out of isolation in 1992 and our Test-match areas were our provinces. It was insanely good, but the world didn’t know it.

He would say a drop goal is the easiest three points on the rugby field and poor Joel had to kick and kick and kick.

That was the regime that Kitch brought in. So Joel would kick to us and we would catch the ball, but even if we spilled the ball on the 16th restart, we would start again. ‘We did restarts and we said we wanted 20 perfect restarts. If somebody fell behind, we would give him the opportunity to come back and if he couldn’t, then we would start again from scratch. We had these benches that we had to climb on and we would count and every player needed to be in time. Then we did this power half hour which was the toughest thing I have gone through and I think everybody went through. ‘It would be intense and you would be knackered. ‘So, the power half hour that Os refers to, we would train fitness and then we would do our game-plan training,’ Pienaar explained. Pienaar further explained the concept of the ‘power half hour’ but added that he felt the 1995 Springboks were far more skilful than what they were given credit for. We did around 80 scrums in the morning and then 120 scrums against the scrum machine.’ Those steps there, I can’t remember how many we did. Even now when I drive past Wanderers, where we trained, I still get nerves. That was because of the hard work beforehand, before the World Cup. I thought we had the better of them in the scrum.

As a tight five, the All Blacks played 45 Tests together consecutively. But Olo Brown was one of the world’s best scrummagers. ‘Training that power half hour, I hated every minute of that.

The power hour team