LONG READ Morné van den Berg: ‘Give ‘Krappies’ the jersey for a run of Tests and let him build a partnership with Sacha’

As soon as Morné van den Berg was named player of the match in Turin, minutes before the final whistle confirmed South Africa’s 66-7 win over Italy, the television camera found him. Then it cut to Cobus Reinach in the stands and lingered. You could almost imagine the director had been waiting all afternoon to make a point about succession.

Two days later, Rassie Erasmus named his team for France. Van den Berg would start. Reinach would be on the bench. It will be Van den Berg’s seventh Test start, on his 13th cap, and the first time Erasmus has picked him to start two in a row.

For a side that has built one of the sport’s great dynasties, the scrum-half position has posed something of a conundrum. Seven men have started there across 76 Springbok Tests since the 2019 World Cup final. Reinach has started more than any of them, but even his longest run is only five Tests.

Grant Williams had started five in a row immediately before him, a run that ended in defeat at Eden Park in 2025. Reinach took over in Wellington and kept the shirt through to Paris that year. Twelve months on, he’s back in Paris but this time, the No.9 jersey belongs to Van den Berg.

Erasmus made the same call in Baltimore, with a series against the All Blacks to win. Reinach had started both victories that put the Boks 2-1 up in Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry. Van den Berg started the decider, producing a virtuoso display that earned him player of the match in a 43-28 win. He scored a try and won a penalty over the ball after Cam Roigard broke through midfield. But the sequence that best explained why Erasmus had picked him began with a scrum.

South Africa had just gone 22-14 up and New Zealand had knocked on after the restart. Van den Berg took the short side and found Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu already gathering speed. André Esterhuizen carried into the 22, Pieter-Steph du Toit burrowed over and Van den Berg, deputising for a hobbling fly-half, kicked the conversion himself.

He had seen a similar gap on his first senior outing for the Lions. In a pre-season game against the Bulls at FNB Stadium in January 2020, the 22-year-old came off the bench, wriggled out of Cornal Hendricks’ grasp and squeezed past Manie Libbok down the blind side for a 25-metre try. A little later, he threw a pass from a defensive scrum that sailed past his own backline and handed the Bulls a try.

“That’s ‘Krappies’ for you,” his coach at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Hugo van As, told The Citizen newspaper. Krappie means ‘little crab’ in Afrikaans. It’s just about perfect for a scrum-half who likes to pinch the ball and squeeze through gaps that look too small for him.

Van den Berg had played centre at Hoërskool Linden in Johannesburg, where Springboks Thinus Delport and Jean Kleyn also learned their craft. He represented the Golden Lions at the Under-16 Grant Khomo Week and came through their academy, but it was at Wits that he got a side to run.

Van As used him at full-back as well as scrum-half, and by 2019 Van den Berg was one of Wits’ standouts in the Varsity Cup, South Africa’s premier inter-university rugby competition. He earned a call-up to the Lions’ Currie Cup squad that year and kept turning out for Wits at club level. He scored four tries in the prestigious Pirates Grand Challenge semi-final, then helped Wits lift the trophy for the first time in 52 years.

He expected to play in the Varsity Cup again the following year. Instead, a week after that Bulls warm-up, he made his Super Rugby debut off the bench in a 38-8 defeat by the Jaguares in Buenos Aires. He started alongside Elton Jantjies against the Reds the next week. By the time Erasmus called him into an alignment camp in March 2024, he had played more than 60 times for the Lions. His made his Test debut against Portugal that July, at 26. His first start was against Australia in Perth, but he played only those two Tests that year.

There have been times when you could name the Springboks scrum-half before you’d seen the team sheet. Joost van der Westhuizen and Fourie du Preez made the jersey theirs.

There were four more in 2025, yielding five tries. He scored twice against Italy at Loftus before Faf de Klerk replaced him in the 54th minute. Afterwards, De Klerk said Van den Berg “wants to learn as much as he can”. Then, two months after reaching 100 Lions appearances this March, Van den Berg needed surgery on a biceps injury. His coach Ivan van Rooyen estimated he’d be out for four to six months. By August he was back in a Bok jersey.

Erasmus also remembered what Van den Berg brought to camp “even if he’s not playing or is just helping with analysis”. He came off the bench against the All Blacks in Cape Town and Soweto. In the second of those games he knocked on under little pressure, put up a high ball that Ethan Hooker nearly won back and, in the 80th minute, chased back towards his own line to bring down Josh Moorby. The following week, with the series on the line, Erasmus gave him the start.

There have been times when you could name the Springboks scrum-half before you’d seen the team sheet. Joost van der Westhuizen and Fourie du Preez made the jersey theirs. Faf de Klerk played the whole of the 2023 World Cup final with no specialist nine on the bench. The Boks have spent much of the time since that night in Paris finding out what different scrum-halves can give them. This week, back in Paris, Erasmus gets to find out a little more about the same one.

Van den Berg, now 29, has scored eight tries in 12 Tests and South Africa have won all six of his starts. Three of those came against Italy and another against a Wales side the Boks beat 73-0. In Turin, his pack gave him a 45-0 half-time lead. Before Soweto, when he was asked about Roigard, Van den Berg said, “As a scrum-half, it’s really difficult if your pack is going back.” France might give him a chance to show what he does when his own pack is going backwards.

The more they play together, the better Feinberg-Mngomezulu will know when to demand the ball and when to get on Van den Berg’s shoulder.

If Erasmus were asking me, I’d give him the jersey for a run of Tests and let him build a partnership with Feinberg-Mngomezulu. There was a glimpse of what that could look like in Baltimore. Van den Berg took the short side and found Feinberg-Mngomezulu on the move, with space to accelerate into. On slower ball, Van den Berg can kick from the base or send the forwards back the other way and make the defence fold around another ruck. The more they play together, the better Feinberg-Mngomezulu will know when to demand the ball and when to get on Van den Berg’s shoulder.

Reinach will be 37 when the World Cup kicks off next year. I’d still want him on the bench if the Boks are four points up with 20 minutes to go in a knockout game. If the opposition’s forwards are tiring and there’s space around the ruck, I’d want Williams. Erasmus can make that call from week to week. But I think he’s found the man to start. I’d like to see what ‘Krappies’ and the boy-wonder Sacha can do with five Tests together.