“To win tonight, and also so resoundingly, was just fantastic. The boys gave everything tonight and we really played as a team. At the same time we have to give credit to South Africa because that was a hard final. That was a real brutal encounter up front. We said we had to take them on and we did.
 
“I am not the only leader in there. We have a number of leaders; someone is a captain of something. That was what reflected the scorecard so well. Everyone took responsibility, everyone did their job and it came together.”
 
New Zealand prop Ben Afeaki:

“We went through our patterns well tonight, but we were able to mess them up quite well in the pack. It was a good encounter and I think everyone enjoyed it.

“We did not expect to go out and win because being in a final anything can happen and we just had to make sure we did our bits right, which we did.  It was a hard game and that is not reflected in the scoreline.

“Our physio and doctor do a lot of work with us after matches and that is one of the reasons why we won tonight.”
 
South African Captain Gerrit van Velze:

“It is not fun to be runners-up and when you get into occasions like finals you do not dream of being second. You have to take all the positives out of it, do not let your heart go down and take all something from the experiences you have gained.
 
“We made it difficult for ourselves to win by conceding two early tries and we had a tough game to come back in. We let ourselves down in the beginning, although we did battle back well.
 
“We probably played into their strengths at times and in the first half we almost just gave it to them so they could run at us. It was hard to defend and the holes eventually opened.
 
“When you pull a Bok jersey over your head you are always proud and even in defeat we will all be keeping our heads high. You learn more from one defeat than 100 victories, I am still proud of the boys and we will stay mates forever.”
 
South African Coach Eric Sauls:

“I still think we were dominant in certain phases, but we played to stereotype and tried to drive, drive, drive all the time. We missed two tackles early on and they were able to score against the run of play. We never gave ourselves an opportunity to play.

“In the second half we came back a little bit. I wanted to play a game where we slowed the ball and try and suck them in and we just lost too many balls, we allowed them to play wide and they migrated to the rucks.

“New Zealand are a brilliant team and if you allow them space and time they will punish you for it. It is difficult to play against a team that has so much talent right across the team. They have running pace, coming hard onto the ball and you have to cover it. If you do not, you will have difficult stopping them and we did tonight.

“The boys can learn from this defeat, and they can still be proud of what they have done.”