Deon Fourie has lifted the lid on one of the 2023 Rugby World Cup final's least-told stories: he was never supposed to play. The Stormers utility, who ended up on the field in Paris against the All Blacks after just three minutes, told the MEGAFOON Rugby podcast that Rassie Erasmus had explicitly warned him during warm-up that he was the insurance policy and the insurance policy only.
It is a story that captures the logistical gamble behind South Africa's seven-one split bench, the one that has since been copied, dissected and debated across the international game. Fourie, a hooker who can cover flanker, was the one body bridging two worlds. If a forward went down, he came on as a forward. If a back went down, fellow bench options shifted across. His job was to plug whatever hole opened up — so long as no hole opened.
"Yeah, no time, I think everything happened so fast," Fourie said of the night. "I plan was for me never to go on, even in the final. I spoke to Rusty during warm-up and he told me, because we went with a seven split, chances of me going on is slim, because we need to keep someone on the bench if a back side's injured — then we'll move to wing and stuff like that. So I always just plug that last hole if something happens."
The hosts pushed him on what that conversation does to a player's head, minutes out from a World Cup final against New Zealand. Fourie was candid. "That's such a confidence builder when a coach says, you know, our plan today is that you're not going to go," he laughed, clearly still able to see the funny side.
Then came Bongi Mbonambi, down early, and the plan he had just talked through with Erasmus dissolved. "That plan went out the window in the first three minutes," Fourie said.
The anecdote arrived wrapped in another vivid snapshot of the pre-match minutes. Fourie described how he, his wife Stacey Bonami and Bongi Mbonambi's young child had stood together on the touchline before kick-off. When Mbonambi went down in the warm-up stages, his child was handed across for the women to hold — and Fourie was left pulling on his shirt, suddenly realising the gamble he'd just talked through with Erasmus was about to unravel.
There was a broader context to Fourie's role in that final. He revealed that the seven-one split conversation had not been a World Cup invention. Months earlier, in the URC, Erasmus had floated the idea of putting pure running backs on the bench. Fourie advised against it. "I spoke to Rusty a couple of months before the World Cup and we were once toying with putting runners on the bench, just in the URC level the season before the World Cup," he said. "I said, 'Coach, we can't risk that.'"
That conversation, Fourie implied, was part of the reason Erasmus eventually landed on him as the hybrid insurance — a forward who could cover the back row and a hooker, but also adjust his body in the chaos of late-match substitutions. By the time Ireland and New Zealand were looking to copy the split and World Rugby was debating whether to cap it, Fourie was already the answer to a question most teams had not yet learned to ask.
With 45 minutes in a World Cup final on what had been meant to be a spectator's night, Fourie earned a place in Springbok folklore by accident. His own confidence booster was the brutally honest warm-up chat from the coach who'd then watched the plan unravel in three minutes flat. "That plan went out the window," he said. South Africa kept their title anyway.
