DHL Stormers number eight Evan Roos insists his Springbok ambitions will not be a factor as the Cape Town outfit embarks on their Vodacom United Rugby Championship play-off campaign.
Roos has been one of the competition’s stand-out performers this season, leading to growing calls for him to be given his chance in the South Africa jersey when Wales tour the country next month.
The 22-year-old ranks top for successful carries and defenders beaten in the URC, helping the Stormers to a second-place finish in the overall table.
Edinburgh are their visitors in the Final Eight on Saturday and Roos insists the Stormers’ team targets are his sole focus despite his seemingly inevitable march towards Test honours.
“If a player goes into the mindset of winning a quarter-final for personal reasons such as getting picked for the Boks, then he's there for the wrong reason,” Roos told a URC media round table.
“Wanting to win a quarter-final, that's winning for the team. Those personal things and individual things I tend not to focus on because the matter of the fact is we need to win the quarter-final and it's for the Stormers.
“Those things will take care of themselves after the season. I'm not really worried about that now.”
Discussing his impressive form, Roos added: “I'm just trying to do the basics right every week and I've got such a great team with me that it ultimately makes those kind of things easy.
“I don't think you can ever be the best. You can always get better. There's always extras I work on every session, every day, so I'm always trying to improve all aspects of my game.
“Me and Steven (Kitshoff) do quite a bit of extras after training. I asked him if he can help me after training and we end up doing extras each day and turnovers at the rucks has been one of those extras. It looks like it's paying off and I'm very happy about that.”